


Just the Way You Are

by halotolerant



Series: Basic Chickens [1]
Category: Basic Instinct (Movies), Mænd & høns | Men & Chicken (2015)
Genre: Ableism, Ableist Language, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Crossover Pairings, Cuddling & Snuggling, Dating, First Kiss, First Meetings, First Time, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, Large Cock, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Sexism, Size Kink, Topping from the Bottom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-08
Updated: 2016-10-12
Packaged: 2018-08-20 06:32:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8239438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: It had been an unexpectedly pleasant process. Historically, women had tended not to be as enthusiastic about Elias’ penis as he felt was indicated. But the men on Grindr were a different story.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings** : Please note tags. Elias and Adam have different and occasionally overlapping prejudices that do neither of them any credit and maybe they're getting better but it's slow. This includes prejudice, including internalised prejudice, about mental health issues and sense of self-worth. If you want to contact me to ask about content before reading, please do. 
> 
> **Notes** : I have ignored 'Basic Instinct 2' storyline (and why not? *g*) and also made certain interpretations of the 'Men & Chickens' plot that suited the story I wanted to tell. 
> 
> This fic is FINISHED and will be updated at least daily, internet access permitting.

Once again, Gabriel was interrupting the man talking on the TV, but Elias didn’t really care.

 

It was nice to be sat together with him, and watching companionably. To be sitting, in fact, on Elias’ cosy sofa, which had across it the old knitted rug that had used to be in their childhood home and smelt of cedar and menthol cigarettes. The sofa springs hadn’t lasted well under the times Elias had tried leaping on them, and sank a bit under their combined weight, but that felt nice, like it was the right place for them to be, a shape just for them.

 

Elias was glad to be able to be like this again. Just him and his brother, just hanging out together because they were also best friends, and although obviously loads of other people wanted their time, they preferred to spend it with each other.

 

And if Gabriel wanted to yell at the TV guy, that was OK. Gabriel had been good about what had happened to Elias over the summer. Gabriel had said to the therapist - when he hadn’t known Elias could hear - _even so, he’s my brother, he’s all my family now. I’m not surprised he imagined he had other brothers, a secret dad, all of that. I wasn’t always there for him. God it’s hard. You’ve seen him. But, I want to be._

 

Gabriel wanted to be around him. Elias had always known that. But it had been nice to have it actually said aloud. Elias had been told he was better and allowed to go home quite soon after that.

 

“That’s just totally inappropriate!” Gabriel yelled suddenly now, and Elias tensed, wondering for a moment what he’d been doing, before realising Gabriel’s words were still directed at the TV.

 

Frowning at the screen, Elias started to pay more attention.

 

A bald guy with a blue suit on was in one chair, leaning forward to talk to two other people on a sofa. He was pointing at them as he spoke, which was rude and not a good way to make people like you.

 

“...look at the facts, that’s all I’m saying here! You know?” the man said, and then when the lady facing him started talking, he immediately interrupted and waved his hands again. “The numbers, the facts, it’s all there. We can see that these gay men, they have casual sex ten, twenty times more often than normal people!”

 

Elias frowned some more. “Is that true?”

 

“Of course it isn’t” Gabriel snapped, still leaning forward, staring at the TV. “Or at least,” he shrugged, “there are some gay men who have lots of sex, just like some straight people, but of course there are those that don’t. And anyway, that guy doesn’t care what’s true, his agenda is totally outside the truth!” He sighed heavily. “What are things coming to that a man like that gets on this show?”

 

Still frowning, Elias turned, prodded Gabriel in the arm to get him to look, because this was seriously confusing. “But surely it’s not good to be gay?”

 

“What? No! Why?” Gabriel looked distressed, nostrils flaring and breathing harder.

 

Elias’s stomach clenched. Nine times out of ten, he didn’t know why he was getting that look from Gabriel. And he hadn’t been having it so much, since the summer. Since the summer, Gabriel had been smiling more. At least sometimes. At least now and again.

 

Gabriel stopped his expression, and took in a deep breath. The therapist had said breathe more - Elias had thought that was pretty pointless advice for the money, because obviously you breathe, but Gabriel had apparently liked it, because quite often when they talked, Gabriel’s eyes closed and it was just breathing for a bit.

 

“Elias, why would you say that?”

 

Elias shrugged. “Girls don’t sleep with you if you’re gay.” He let that truth sink in. But then, making his own rapid calculations: “Hey, wait, this guy says you get more sex if you sleep with men? So I guess maybe it works out. For those guys. Guys that can’t just have all the girls they want anyway, like me.”

 

“Would you like to…” Gabriel was red again, and his tone was the careful one. Like he was talking to a dog or a child or something. Elias didn’t like it. It was kind, it was new since the summer, and he didn’t like it at all.

 

Gabriel cleared his throat. “Would you like to be with a man, Elias?” The words came out all weird, awkward, and Gabriel wasn’t looking at him any more.

 

“I just told you! I have lots of girls! I don’t need to be gay!”

 

“It’s OK, sit down. Sit down, Elias.” The voice again. Elias bristled. He didn’t want to do what he was told.

 

But he didn’t want a fight.

 

He went to sit in the armchair instead. It wasn’t really an armchair, just a chair set apart from the sofa. It had a bag of knitting stuff that Gabriel had bought at the shops today on it, and Elias cast that aside pointedly. It wasn’t like wool could get hurt dropping on the floor. Maybe a little dusty, when the balls rolled away...

 

On TV, the bald man was still going, his voice loud in the silence between them. “...and the thing about the gays is that they’re just not normal. Not normal folk at all.”

 

Elias narrowed his eyes. His fingers hurt where he gripped the arms of the chair.

 

Gabriel cleared his throat. “Let’s watch something else, eh? This is making me cross.” He was speaking loudly, it was weird. “It is making me cross, Elias, because I think it’s fine to be gay. Alexander the Great was gay.”

 

“How Great was he, though? He didn’t manage to conquer India, did he?” Elias got up from the chair and came back over to the sofa - his bottle of beer was on the table next to it, after all. “I guess it would have helped him, though, having the sword and his big horse and so on, when other people wanted to beat him up because they said he was gay.”

 

Gabriel sighed, and ran a hand over his face, and got up himself. For a moment Elias was worried again, but Gabriel was going to the kitchen area, switching on the oven.

 

“What did Evelyn give us for tonight?” Elias asked with some interest.

 

Evelyn was back at the flat she and Gabriel had moved into together a month ago. Elias had to be OK about Evelyn being around sometimes, because that made Gabriel happy, and also not try to sleep with her because that would just be unfair to her – she’d never have as good as him again, after all, and so then she’d just be sad for the rest of her life. But she wasn’t invited here tonight, because Gabriel wanted to spend time with Elias.

 

Evelyn did cook them things, and when Gabriel came round he usually had a dish of some sort covered in tinfoil. If Evelyn left Gabriel, the food would go too.

 

“Moussaka,” Gabriel told him, and came back over to the sofa. “How about the Star Trek DVDs now?”

 

Elias didn’t mind Star Trek. He nodded. He was still thinking hard.

 

He let himself sink into the sofa and stare vaguely at the USS Voyager’s journey home, and started planning.

 

-

 

Bars that were for gay men were difficult in kind of the same way that bars that were for ordinary people were difficult. You needed certain kinds of shoes, or hair, or something. You had to dance, but it couldn’t just be dancing, it had be the right kind, and no one could say what the kind was, there wasn’t a handbook or anything. The men Elias went up to mostly were talking to other people, or pushed past him.

 

Certainly, though, people were having sex at least as much as in the other kind of clubs. Having it off or going off to have it.

 

Elias drank a cola and sat on a bar stool for quite a time, and watched people going to and fro. One or two stared at him, no one smiled. He didn’t think he liked these people.

 

In the summer, when everything had gone a bit wrong after Dad died, he’d wound up in a place in his head where he’d thought he had three new brothers who were all like him in different ways. He’d imagined a world of people like him. And still it had all gone wrong, even in his own mind. The therapist said that some of what Dad had used to say to him, and certainly the things Dad had said in the video after he died, meant it was mostly Dad’s fault. But then it was probably her job to say that.

 

Once, Elias had seen in a supermarket that someone had left a pot of herring in the cream pastry section, just put it there and gone on. It was grey silver and stinky, and all of that made it a good pot of herring but it was all wrong in the pastry section.

 

Elias felt a lot like that pot of herring sometimes.

 

Watching the men dancing now, watching them swaying, gyrating, grinding their hips… he wasn’t gay, obviously, and he didn’t want to think about another man’s penis because if you weren’t gay you didn’t want that, but actually when considered as just nice, warm bodies they looked… nice. And warm. Like it wouldn’t be so bad.

 

He had to take himself to the club bathroom after a while. When he got into a toilet cubicle, he found that there were two people in the one next to his, bumping up against the shared wall, breathing hard - there were these little wet sounds, grunts, one guy whining very softly under his breath with each thud.

 

It made him feel peculiar, almost sad. He went straight out again. He wasn’t hard anymore.  

 

-

 

He should have tried Google at once, he realised, because it told him really quickly that what he needed was an app called Grindr. That was the modern way, and it seemed like maybe it was rude nowadays not to flirt on phones, or something. Then the problem was that he didn’t have the kind of phone that you could put apps on.

 

Luckily, Gabriel let Elias borrow his phone to play games on if he liked, or to look up bus times or taxi numbers - if he’d washed his hands first - and getting the app from the app where you got apps was pretty easy. He’d had to wait a week from the time of visiting the club to seeing Gabriel again, and he wanted to take his chance and get this done quickly.

 

Elias had been thinking a bit about the club, during the working week - driving the cart up and down the warehouse, loading, unloading, driving back. He thought that it pretty much proved that there was lots of sex happening, in the world of gay people, even if surveying one club one evening wasn’t necessarily a good statistical representative. He’d done some other reading too, online, and discovered that what the kids at his school and some of the men in the warehouse had said was very wrong and it was bad not to think gay people were the same as straight, nowadays. So he as a good person ought to be ready to let gay men have the benefit of his body. He was being progressive. It really all made a lot of sense.

 

He was excited to get started.

 

However, midway through the app sign-up process, trouble struck again. You had to take a picture of yourself, and Elias didn’t really know how to get the angle right when he couldn’t see the photo he was taking as he took it. He could ask Gabriel - busy carrying the paint upstairs, their task today and the reason for Elias’ visit to Gabriel’s that they were going to paint the guest bedroom of Gabriel’s new place together - but then Gabriel might want to know why Elias wanted to take a photo at all, and that discussion might take a while, and time was running out.

 

The picture Elias ended up getting was mostly wall and a blur of half his cheek, but it let the app move on in the registering process, and nervously, quickly, Elias was able to start navigating it, and looking at the pictures of all the other guys.

  
That was when he realised that not all the men on the app had taken photos of their faces.

 

Well, that would be easier to get in frame, anyway.

 

Listening carefully for the sound of Gabriel on the stairs, Elias stood up, pulled his tracksuit trousers and pants down, and angled himself for a good light. It had been a while for him - he was trying to go off and touch himself less often, because it made Gabriel uncomfortable and being flexible around people you like is a good thing, and so now just a bit of cool air made his penis thicken and the tip flush. He ached to touch it, just the once, but he’d promised he wouldn’t touch himself and then the phone.

 

He took the photo, swapped it for the picture that had been on his profile before, and then heard Gabriel yelling for him to come help.

 

Elias set the phone down and went to paint.

 

It was about three hours later that they staggered back down the stairs. Elias was mostly thinking that the backs of his ankles ached, and that he’d never get the smell of paint out of his nose or his hair. And all to make the room white! Who wanted a white room? That was the most boring colour in the world! It wasn’t even a colour!

 

“What the…?” Gabriel said suddenly, sounding anxious. Elias had gone to get a drink of water from the tap, but Gabriel had gone over to the sofa.

 

And the table with the phone.

 

Elias strode over, biting at his lip. Gabriel was a good person, obviously, and would understand about being progressive and equality, and had even said he didn’t mind people being gay, but that didn’t mean Elias doing this wouldn’t seem like a bad thing to him.

  
It wouldn’t be at all nice, if Gabriel thought he was bad.

 

“I don’t…” Gabriel was staring at his phone, make quick, anxious swipes with his finger. “No!” he muttered under his breath, “I don’t want to do that, sir, what the hell?” he was looking at the phone and going more and more pale. “ _That looks like a juicy cucumber, will you fill my sandwich?_ ” he read out. “What is this? I think I must have been hacked, cloned, something!”

 

“Oh, yes.” Elias cleared his throat. “It is part of my social experiment.”

 

Gabriel looked up at him, eyes and mouth wide.

 

“Experiment?”

 

“Yes. Oh yes, very scientific. Experiment to see if you can have more sex with gay men.”

 

The ends of Gabriel’s ears were going pink. He started coughing.

 

-

 

“Which is how I got here now,” Elias was explaining. “Gabriel - that is my brother, like I was telling you - said that I could look through the messages once and reply immediately, and then I had to delete the app from his phone so he’d stop getting messages all the time and so his stupid girlfriend didn’t get confused why he had it on the phone, and so I had to pick one or two of what was best just from that short time, you see.”

 

It had been an unexpectedly pleasant process. Historically, women had tended not to be as enthusiastic about Elias’ penis as he felt was indicated. But the men on Grindr were a different story. Even in a couple of hours, he’d got over thirty messages and requests and - and this was a bit more complicated - photos sent back.

 

He didn’t want to see other men’s penises. Because he wasn’t gay. And he wasn’t sure how he felt about bottoms. Wouldn’t that be rather difficult, really? And messy?

 

“But then I saw your photo and it was... “ Elias waved his hands in the air over the table between them, trying to tie down what he meant. This photo had been… classy. Like something in porn that was too expensive to be called porn and was actually a movie in cinemas instead: a young man who looked like a Grecian marble statue come to life, turning round to face back, as if to someone he was walking away from, a towel slipping down his hips so just the very top of his crack could be seen - like woman’s cleavage in a low top, so liking it made sense. The man’s back was smooth and tan and he had neat hips almost like a girl and…

 

“I thought you looked a lot like a girl, really,” Elias explained, “and so I thought you’d be a good one to start on. Because I date girls, usually, and I date them all the time, so I need to do some sort of a transition process to the men, and you would work for that I think. And you haven’t interrupted me at all so far, so this is very good.”

 

In fact, even as he finished speaking, the young man across the restaurant table from him didn’t speak for quite a bit of time. Elias grinned hopefully, and tried not to fidget.

 

“Well yes,” said the man who’d introduced himself as Adam Towers, after a little while longer. “I admit, you’ve got me there pal.” He spoke Danish in an odd accent, he’d learnt from someone really countryside, and he was clearly English underneath.

 

Up close he was prettier even than in the photo’s soft lighting. His lips curved smooth and plump and red, his chestnut brown hair fell all round his ears in little curls. His eyes were a kind of endless green like the sea. “I mean, congrats Elias, for the first time in my life I have no idea what to say. So I guess I’ll just leave.”

 

And to Elias’ dismay, Adam stood up and away from their table, almost kicking his chair over in the process. 

 

\- - -


	2. Chapter 2

Adam Towers was having the crappiest of ends to the crappiest of weeks.

 

For some reason that was probably a serious problem, like actual mass hypnosis of all newspaper owners in the Northern Hemisphere, no wanted to pick up his series on modern sexuality and the dating market. One after another they’d told him it wasn’t in the public mood, or it wasn’t interesting enough, or it wasn’t quite what their readership liked, thank you.

 

 _The problem is, Adam, that you can have anyone you want, any time you like_ , one editor had told him over a cup of cheap coffee and a fag, shivering in the street outside a café in Spitalfields. _You can have anyone at your feet in about five seconds flat. You don’t get what it’s like for normal people, and that’s what readers need to hear - someone who understands._

 

Sometimes, Adam would have appreciated that comment, but coming when it had, this week, it merely rubbed salt into a very fresh wound.

 

Freja was leaving him. After all that, after he’d moved, bloody moved half his stuff to Denmark to spend time with her, after about the biggest commitment he’d ever made in his life to anyone, after only three months living partially together, she was leaving him for a fucking oncologist.

 

 _The problem is, Adam,_ she’d told him, her face covered in mascara she’d cried all down it, _you don’t even try to open up to me, to let me into your life. You don’t think about anyone but yourself._

 

He thought her moving in with a guy who’d incidentally made over a million US dollars equivalent in a year, and owned three houses, one in Saudi Arabia, wasn’t the most selfless thing he’d ever heard of either. And then he’d made the crucial mistake of telling her that.

 

 _You think women like me just come along every day, Adam?_ She’d been fairly bristling. _You couldn’t have tried a bit harder?_

 

 _Fuck women,_ Adam had said to himself then. He’d been more than a little drunk by that point, and maybe OK, struggling not to cry himself with sheer frustration. She should have been grateful he’d kept himself to himself –as if she would actually want to hear the crap inside his head, the feelings he was trying to deal with on a daily basis! As if that would have made their relationship better or longer lasting! _Fuck women. I’m fucking bisexual, I can have the whole population of this planet!_

 

And so he’d got home, got drunker, slept that off, woken up feeling shit, shoved back down all the dark creatures rising in his brain saying how fucking useless he was, gone to a day spa and the barber and primped up, taken a load of photos and fired up his old Grindr account. He wasn’t due back in London for two weeks - holiday he’d planned to spend with Freja, but screw her - and he was going to have a fucking good time.

 

And the day before, scrolling through new and nearby Grindr profiles, he’d thought he’d found his good time for sure.  

 

Because that dick on ‘Elias21’? That was what he needed, right there. That, often as possible, deep as possible, repeatedly over several days if he could get it (he would get it, he was fucking irresistible). He’d sent a message at once and when an answer had come back suggesting a meeting he’d practically bitten the guy’s hand off.

 

He should have realised something was wrong when he’d got the restaurant and seen the person who was waiting for him. Adam knew fat dicks didn’t always come with handsome faces but this was something else - who the fuck had a cleft lip nowadays? And that perm? Had they all gone back to 1979? And that anorak, those awful polyester trousers…

 

The guy talked like he was delivering a lecture. And fuck, within the first sentence of what he said Adam was already furious. It was all so completely ridiculous, even across the language barrier, that he would have worried that was actually being set up for a gay-bashing, at least if the guy hadn’t so obviously taken the homophobic shit he was talking totally seriously.

 

Adam didn’t have time or energy to deal with it. The low-burn hum of anticipatory of arousal, which had been with him in the day he personally had spent dressing, grooming and preparing himself (more than pleasurably) for this date was gone, washed out with cold water and disappointment. He wasn’t even going to bother getting angry, he was just going to go.

 

He could see the look of dismay on this guy Elias’ face and he didn’t care. Let some other person be the one to explain everything that had been wrong about… well, everything about Elias’ approach. He wasn’t getting another minute of Adam’s time, dick or no dick. Probably no dick. Probably he’d got that picture off the internet. Probably it was all lies, everyone fucking lied, every person on Earth.

 

Even this idiot Elias didn’t want Adam for Adam. Just for some total gay panic bullshit.

 

Thing was, even as he planned to just cut his losses and leave, Adam had forgotten that this week? Was the crappiest week of all time.

 

So of course, as he rising to go, as he was mentally resigning himself to a night of jacking off to his laptop and drinking scotch with ice-cream and trying not to let himself think, he saw coming in through the restaurant doors Freja and fucking motherfucker Erik.

 

“Is something wrong?” he realised Elias was asking him. The man sounded totally bewildered still, somehow.

 

“Yeah, something.” Adam looked at the way the waitress was leading Freja, and made a quick estimation. If he ran he might manage it.

 

Ducking and weaving, he set off across the floor to try and get out before they noticed him.

 

They were looking at menus, at wall decorations. Freja was fussing with her stole. They weren’t going to notice him. He would salvage this, at least.

 

There was an almighty crash behind him. Adam turned, couldn’t help it.

 

On the floor, having apparently collided with a waiter carrying a tray of glasses, was Elias. As Adam watched, he scrambled up, gave his hand rather ceremoniously to the waiter to shake and apparently apologised, and then staggered on towards Adam like some kind of misguided missile.

 

“You didn’t tell me what was wrong,” Elias announced loudly, as he found his place at Adam’s side. “I can’t help if you don’t tell me.”

 

The entire restaurant was looking at them now.

 

Adam closed his eyes for a moment and hoped it might all go away. It really didn’t.

 

“I just wanted to go.” Adam said, through his teeth, because he kept shit in, that was what he did, he kept it all inside and under control.

 

Wide eyed, Elias stared at him. “But we didn’t eat yet. Aren’t you hungry? I guess we could buy chips or something and eat and walk but we came here, don’t you want to eat?”

 

Adam was drawing a breath, about to yell despite himself, when he heard the laughter.

 

He knew that laugh. He shouldn’t have turned, but he did, and there was Freja, giggling into her mineral water. Seeing him look, she made a token attempt to compose herself and waved.

 

“Hi Adam! Didn’t expect to see you here darling! Who’s your… friend?”

 

Just to get out of the central spotlight, and in the hope that at least some of the onlookers would stop paying attention, Adam went over to her table, not without resenting every step.

 

“Freja. Hi. I was just leaving, actually.”

 

“Not without introducing us, surely?” she gave him a narrow smile, and almost licked her lips.

 

“My name is Elias,” came a voice from just behind Adam’s shoulder. “Adam and I are on a date. I am not gay, but he wanted me, so…”

 

Adam wondered if the ground would swallow him up. Failing that, he had to think fast.

 

He should have drunk all the wine whilst Elias was still talking crap. Wouldn’t have made this better, but might have made him feel somewhere slightly more well off than about to melt with embarrassment.

 

“Ha ha ha Elias, very funny.” He turned and punched the other man, not gently, in the shoulder. “Elias is a funny guy, you know? Great sense of humour. Yeah we’ve been dating a while now.”

 

“Oh really?” Freja looked slightly less confident than she had a moment ago.

 

“Yeah, a while.” Adam tried smile nonchalantly, happily. “He’s really my type you know? A bit like Erik is yours - like, Erik is so sensible, so… traditional and normal. Whereas Elias is a free thinker.” Well that much was kind of true. “Really original.”

 

“He would seem to be,” Freja commented, looking him up and down.

 

All this time, Erik had been studying his menu and ignoring them. Now he set it down with a sigh. “Really, Freja, can we have some peace now? I told you, I don’t care to hear about all your homosexual exes.”

 

Freja blushed. Adam bit his lip. He didn’t exactly like her anymore, but that was too much.

 

“No one addressed you, Erik,” he said.

 

“I am simply trying to have a nice night out with my partner. May I suggest you go and do the same, somewhere better equipped to cater to… your sort?”

 

“And what exactly do you mean by that?”

 

“You know what I mean.”

 

“Erik, please,” Freja murmured. He shook her hand off his shoulder.

 

“Now listen here, Erik…” Adam began, raising his hand.

 

“No, I think you should listen.” Erik got up. “You’re not welcome here, either of you, now go away.”

 

He was a tall guy, when he stood, and pretty built, arms like tree trunks. How the fuck you got to look like that around twelve hour shifts walking wards, Adam dreaded to think.

 

Nonetheless, suddenly Adam was aware of a wailing sort of noise next to him, and then a blur of movement, and then Elias was past him in a flurry of limbs, and slapping Erik round the head.

 

Or trying to - Erik was hitting back pretty hard, meaty palms thudding down, one elbow landing smack in Elias’ stomach, making him cry out.

 

Adam winced for him. “Fuck, Elias!”

 

He could have just left the whole place then, preferably at a run. It certainly occurred to him to do so. But somehow he was wading in and dragging Elias out, and getting not a few blows himself in the process, and with the waiting staff pushing from behind they were swaying out of the door, gasping together.

 

-

 

They got permanently kicked out of the restaurant, obviously. No one was really hurt. Elias had a cut in his lower lip but it wasn’t very deep, and just bled all down his jacket which Adam thought was probably the best thing that could happen to such a garment. Hopefully it would subsequently be burnt.

 

“What did you do that for?” Adam asked, as they wandered, panting, down the road. It was really dark now, the street lamps coming on. A few shop windows were lit up and glowing, some people still scurrying past. Just into coat weather - Adam had been warned about Danish winters by Freja, but he’d thought that she and him would be getting through them snuggled together.

 

“What?” Elias kicked a can into the road. His shoulders were a little hunched. He was nursing his stomach, slightly - that had to ache, still.

 

“Why did you attack that guy, in there, Erik?”

 

Elias shrugged. “He was being rude to you.”

 

“But you’ve only just met me.”

 

“Does that make it less rude?”

 

Adam stared at him. “You were rude to me, Elias, do you realise that?”

 

“Rude?” Elias looked genuinely shocked, and again more than a little dismayed. Then he frowned and clicked his tongue. “Is there a different manners for gay people? You’d think they could warn you about that somehow. Like on the app home screen or something.”

 

“That - the way you talk about gay people. About me. It’s… it’s not OK.”

 

“But I want to like gay people!” Elias’ arms went wide, uncomprehending. “I want to let gay people have sex with me. Well, gay men. The gay women don’t want to, but that’s their loss.” He sniffed.

 

“Elias,” Adam took a breath, stifling a hysterical giggle. He was teetering on an edge between amusement and fury.

 

But then, Elias appeared to be taking this seriously, and – in very much his own way – appeared to be trying to get this right.

 

And Elias had stood up for him, which was more than anyone else had done in… well, in a very, very long time actually.

 

And Elias was still walking alongside him, despite the scene in the restaurant that had honestly been more about the bullshit in Adam’s life than anything else.

 

“Yes?” Elias prompted, looking wary.

 

“We still didn’t eat.” Adam pointed out. “You want to go get something?”

 

Like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, Elias beamed at him. It was kind of nice.

 

-

 

They went to a kebab shop, and got their meat in flatbreads with shredded lettuce and chips and loads of mayonnaise. It made Adam’s heart ache a bit for London and the place in Kentish Town where he’d used to go when he worked through the night on deadlines for the crappy Sunday tabloid he’d started out with a decade earlier.

 

He found himself telling Elias this.

 

“My first job was in a chemical engineering works,” Elias told him in reply. He had mayonnaise in his moustache. “I liked it there. I got to do a lot of interesting things. But then... “ he stopped, frowning sadly, and sighed, and rubbed at his upper lip. This smeared the mayonnaise around.

 

Adam offered him a paper napkin. He was surprised when Elias used it to dab at his eyes.

 

“Thank you,” Elias said, seriously. And then, blinking. “I’m not sad! I have too much chilli on this kebab, it’s awful, it’s really not a good thing at all to provide such hot chilli to unsuspecting customers.”

 

Adam shrugged, and took another comforting bite of his own food, and then a swig of Coke Zero. He was feeling a sense of rapidly advancing fatalism - that the night was ruined, and he might as well lean into the decline.

 

“I’m confused,” Elias was saying now. Adam looked up.

 

Elias had, one way or another, cleaned his face, and was sitting up straight and rather formal.

 

“Are we still going to have sex?” Elias asked him, earnestly. “Because it’s OK, you know, I still don’t mind doing it even though you have awful friends.”

 

“That’s big of you.” Adam muttered, and ran a hand over his face.

 

“Oh, I’m very big,” said Elias smugly, and with perfect confidence settling over him like a mantle.

 

Adam bit his lip. He noticed Elias notice this, and carefully sucked his lower lip in, then let it out again. It was nice, making someone make that facial expression.

 

A night of meaningless, soothing sex - hadn’t that always been the plan?

 

“Are you really?” Adam pushed. “Was that you, in the photo?”

 

Elias looked mildly outraged. “Of course! I don’t believe in false advertising! Except, of course,” he shrugged, “I mean, I don’t know what the convention is in the community for state of tumescence. I get bigger than that, when... you know.”

 

Something in Adam’s belly made a pleasurable flip. He began, in various places, to recall his preparations for the evening. Inside, parts of him were reminded that they hadn’t been touched in quite a while.

 

And in fairness, some of the anonymous men he’d fucked over the years might have been much more awful than Elias. They just might not have had time or volubility enough to make him aware of the fact.

 

“I have a hotel room,” Adam murmured. “If you’d like to.”

 

Elias’s eyes widened. He looked suddenly rather young, despite the grey hairs.

 

But he nodded, rapidly, and threw down his napkin.


	3. Chapter 3

Elias had got a plan all ready for when the sex part of the evening came.

 

He would do it like you did with a girl. He would have the guy lie on his back with his legs open, and maybe ask him to put a towel over his penis so Elias didn’t have to look at it – Elias would be careful to ask politely - and then Elias could do the sex like he was with a girl, and that would be more familiar. At least to his hindbrain, where sex stuff was probably programmed from birth, whether or not you’d actually technically totally already done it.

 

He had, after all, very nearly had sex with several women. More or less. He had been in bed with one of them. Kind of. They had both had clothes on but it had absolutely been a bed.

 

As the evening with Adam had progressed - and Elias still wasn’t sure exactly what had been going on with the awful couple in the restaurant, but it seemed like he’d not on this occasion made a mistake in doing what it had been instinctual to do - he’d thought more and more than having sex with Adam would be actually quite a nice experience. Adam was very pretty, after all, even in real life, and he had a nice mouth, and when he had bent over to tie his shoelace in his street, his bottom had looked good in a way that Elias thought was a cause for optimism, in terms of how gay sex might turn out to be.

 

And it was definitely OK to like to a man’s bottom. Women had bottoms just the same, didn’t they? That wasn’t gay or straight, that was just… people.

 

In the twenty-four hours between their first exchange of messages and the date, Elias had thought a couple of times about the idea of Adam-in-the-photo in bed with his legs open, but that had been suddenly all rather hot and red and that other feeling, the tight, sick, wanting-to-hit-out one, that his therapist had said was actually being afraid.

  
So Elias had kept his planning general and not too Technicolor - when he’d sketched out his sex plans on the back of an envelope, just to be ready, he’d used stick figures.

 

In fact, having an erection was usually something he thought of as at least an annoying thing, if not a bad one, because so often it was an inconvenience, or people laughed, or looked unhappy with him. The therapist had talked to him about ways to be in control of his body and what he did with it, and some of those techniques worked better than what he’d tried by himself, but even so all of that just made the whole thing even more work and stress.

 

When they’d left the kebab shop this evening, though, and Elias had been helplessly hard from their conversation and Adam had noticed, Adam had just grinned, and started walking a bit faster, looking over his shoulder to see Elias following, just like in his photo.

 

Elias had imagined him like the photo – nearly nude, towel falling off – and hurried after him.

 

When they reached Adam’s hotel room - in the nice Radisson in the centre of Copenhagen - Elias wondered if all the staff at the reception knew they were going up to have sex together. He set his shoulders back proudly, and hoped so.

 

Then he began to worry a bit about his sex plan. He’d never really… gone into details, for some things. Some things that were probably important. Mechanically speaking.

 

“We have to use condoms,” Elias blurted out in the shiny, bright lift, as the motion against gravity added to the funny feeling in his belly. “Gabriel - that’s my brother, I told you about my brother - he said I had to promise to use condoms.”

 

Adam laughed at him. But not very nastily, and he leant in to punch at Elias’ shoulder again. Up close he smelt good - some kind of aftershave, and ketchup, and salt.

 

“You have a very sensible brother, Elias.”

 

Elias wondered if he should try and kiss Adam. They were closer now, and Adam was looking at him, and it felt… sort of pleasant, sort of warm inside, when their eyes met briefly, and it was getting hotter in his body, buzzy.

 

But then the doors pinged, and Adam walked out first.

 

And when they got from the corridor into the room - it was a couple of rooms, practically a suite - it turned out Elias didn’t need a plan at all, because Adam went straight at him.

 

“Mmmmm, c’mon, I need this, c’mon.” Adam was murmuring, whining in a way that was weirdly unlike how he’d been talking before, like he was playing at something. And he put his hand between Elias’ legs, sudden and shocking and so hot.

 

Elias stiffened, teetering on the edge. Adam’s fingers cupped him, it was extraordinary, slightly startling, awfully good. They were tilting into each other, but not really touching. Elias’ arms felt heavy, awkward - could he put them round Adam now?

 

Adam sighed heavily, and pulled away.

 

“Take your clothes off already,” he said, through a sigh, and gave funny, cat-like yawn, cracking his jaw.

 

“You take yours off too,” Elias challenged at once, stung.

 

“Fine,” Adam shrugged - he was so relaxed, it seemed, like none of this was a big deal, like it wasn’t scary at all - and stripped out of his scarf and polo neck top. His chest was soft and smooth underneath, girlish like in his photo. “Well come on then,” he encouraged, undoing his belt, and Elias reckoned it was reasonable to take his own jacket off too, that that was only fair. He unzipped that, and took off his button-down shirt and then his vest.

 

“Good,” Adam murmured from the other side of the room, in a sigh, and Elias realised he was looking at Elias’ chest in return. Adam was smiling more again now.

 

“Big hairy man, I like that. Mmmm, yes.” Adam came back over, only his pants and socks left on him – white, brilliant white cotton straining at his crotch - and abruptly put his hands to Elias’s waistband, taking all his lower half covering most of the way down his thighs.

 

“Oh, why hello there,” said Adam, in English, and his eyes glazed over a bit.

 

Elias felt his penis thickening even more. It was almost fully out of the foreskin already, even without being touched, and wet on top. He felt acutely aware of every inch of it, and how it was almost visibly throbbing under Adam’s gaze.  

 

Adam’s own penis was making a growing lump in those tight, white briefs with their Calvin Klein waistband. Elias didn’t want to see anyone else’s penis in a sex way, obviously, but it did seem like viewing it would be good feedback for how well his own impressed. He liked the idea that him being hard was making Adam hard. That seemed like a nice circle. Girls getting wet or whatever, that was all rather complicated. A penis you could just look at and see, yes or no, truth or lie.

 

And if Adam liked Elias’ penis, then that was good, this was going well, and Elias could proceed like the plan.

 

He leant in, and tried to kiss Adam’s mouth.

 

It was all a thud, bone and teeth jarring together, and Adam took several steps back. Elias felt his face ache with heat, and clenched his hands at his sides. He wanted to shout - it was so unfair not knowing how this was supposed to happen, it was nothing like in the movies and that was so unreasonable - but he closed his eyes for a moment and did breathing instead, and it did help.

 

“OK, listen, I’ve got this. Just get on the bed.” Adam, rubbing at his mouth, was returning to him, and Elias blinked his eyes open, confused.

 

“What?”

 

“Get on the bed, lie on your back.” Adam stared at him then sighed. “Get on the bed, please, and maybe we can make this work.”

 

“I know how sex works!”

 

“Yeah, well, you haven’t fucked a man before have you? You said so yourself. And you’ve got to be… careful with a man. I want you to be careful with me so it doesn’t hurt.” Adam coughed, and for some reason he blushed himself now. “At least, not a lot. Not too much.”

 

Well obviously that was very important. Elias climbed carefully onto the bed, but he couldn’t make himself lie flat, that felt too strange when Adam was still up and about.

 

Adam soon came over to join him though. He had a bottle taken from one of the suitcases that lay on the floor. Actually, when Elias looked, there were lots of suitcases on the floor and a few cardboard boxes, all spilling stuff out but not really unpacked. That seemed like a strange way to travel but people said gay men were good at clothes sorts of things, so who was Elias to judge?

 

Anyway, there were other calls on his attention: Adam had shimmied out of his pants and kicked them off and away as he crossed the room back to where Elias lay on the bed.

 

Adam’s penis wasn’t so awful to look at, really. Neat, pink – no foreskin, which to Elias seemed very vulnerable. Adam had a neat little ball-sack too, and his bottom was lusciously round.

 

“Budge over, then,” Adam instructed. Then he sighed. “Please move over. We need the space.”

 

“You want to…” Elias frowned. It would be bad to guess wrong.

 

“I want to sit on your cock, if we can ever get there.”

 

Elias swallowed, hard. Obviously, people did that all the time. He’d seen pictures, even. But he still wasn’t sure.

 

“You…” He took a breath in and let it out. Even after thinking about it, the words still seemed like the most true ones. “I don’t want to hurt you, Adam.”

 

Adam stared across at him, then reached out and ran a hand down Elias’ chest, carding through the hair, plucking at one of Elias’ nipples.

  
Between them, Elias’ cock dipped and dribbled.

 

“I can get that in me, don’t worry,” Adam whispered. His hand was travelling down, very slowly. He scratched gently at the slight curve of Elias’ belly, circling his navel with one finger. Elias stared at that finger, watching its descent and forgetting to breathe at all. “I can get…” and Adam was stroking at the muscles of Elias’ groin, at the dip next to his hipbone, tugging at the longer, thicker hairs nearer the centre, “...anything I want into me, if I want to.”

 

“And you want _me_ inside you?” Elias could hardly hear his own voice, it was so gruff. And the words seemed so incredibly unlikely.

 

“Yeah, Elias, tonight I do.” Adam smiled slightly, and suddenly his hand, his lovely warm hand, was gone from the inside of Elias’ thigh and clutching at his wrist instead. “Come on and see.”

 

Pulling Elias’ captive hand forward, Adam tipped some stuff from the bottle onto both their fingers. The stuff was slick and shiny – so lube, probably. Elias had never seen lube in real life, he’d always thought you only bought it if you only had sex with yourself, and he didn’t want anyone to think that about him, but actually if you were going to do sex… _that way_ , the way Adam was asking for, using it made a lot of sense.

 

“Normally I do this part for myself, alone, like out in the bathroom or something while the guy waits,” Adam was saying. He was kneeling up, and as he moved Elias had to go and lie flatter so they fit, and soon Adam was straddling over him, on his knees, dragging Elias’ hand around and behind him. “But I reckon you might not like being left on the bed by yourself. So consider this a lesson, I guess.”

 

“It’s not nice being alone,” Elias pointed out.

 

“No. I suppose it isn’t.” Adam was still positioning Elias’ hand, and suddenly Elias realised why.

 

“I don’t watch to touch there!”

 

Adam huffed. “You want to put your cock there, you’d better be ready to put your fingers there first. Or do you want to just stop?”

 

Elias did not want to stop. He tried to reason with the part of his brain that wasn’t sure. After all, piss came out of penises didn’t it? This wasn’t so different than that. All a matter of perspective.

 

“I did shower, earlier.” Adam told him, and after a moment Elias understood what he meant, and relaxed a fraction more. Then Adam shifted his weight, and put his other hand back on Elias’ belly, stroking the hair there softly. Elias’ penis bobbed, jealous of the skin that was getting touched.

 

Very slowly, Elias relaxed the tension in his arm, and let Adam drag his slippery finger in between the cheeks of Adam’s bottom. It was hot there, and the skin felt different, crinkly, and then…

 

“Mmmm,” Adam sighed, and wriggled back against him a bit. “Yeah, like that, good.”

 

Elias bit his lip, looking up at Adam’s face above him, the way he was flushing, eyes closed, and ran the pad of his finger over the puckered dip again, even though he wasn’t entirely sure what that expression meant.

 

“Yeah.” Adam took his wrist once more, changed the position, and then started rubbing back against Elias’ fingers like some kind of cat. “Yeah, mmm, push in when you can.”

 

Elias couldn’t see what he was doing, only feel it. That helped, kind of. And right there, over him, Adam’s face getting sweaty and happy as Elias prodded and pressed, that helped too. That helped make all the other worries go into the background.

 

When Elias managed to get one finger in through the tight ring altogether, he felt something and realised Adam’s penis had spurted a little bit, like his did sometimes when he was really wanting it, and now the drops lay cooling, caught in Elias’ chest hair.

 

Adam looked him in the eye - that felt so good, and so weird - and brought his own shoulders down, his round, pretty bottom still up in the air and moving, and put his mouth near Elias’ chest and licked at the spatters.

 

His torso brushed Elias’ penis in the motion, and Elias wanted, desperately, to push into him, to forcibly roll them over and rut against him till he came. It wouldn’t take long. They could go back to this after.

 

“Stay still,” Adam told him firmly, pressing a hand to his shoulder to keep him flat, and Elias liked that, had to close his eyes and turn his head away. It was almost like being held, very nearly, and it felt good and safe.

 

He wanted to make Adam feel good too. He pushed a second finger into him, very carefully.

 

“Fuck yeah.” Adam kept shifting, restless, and now he reared back again. “Yeah, more, come on, give it to me.”

 

Elias tried his best. He moved his two fingers deeper, and a bit faster. It was so hot, so incredibly hot inside Adam’s body and his bottomhole felt tight around Elias’ fingers.

 

He imagined putting his penis in there. Then he tried to stop because he was leaking, shuddering, he could feel it in his belly, everything tightening up, he was so close just from the thought.

 

“Fuck, it’s going to feel so good, you’re going to fill me up so good,” Adam said, terribly.

 

Elias broke. Two fingers deep in Adam’s body, Adam’s hand firm on his shoulder, Adam’s semen and spit on his skin and he came, he came everywhere, he came tragically and endlessly and it was all wrong, total failure.

 

“I’m sorry,” he was saying, even as the tremors of it continued to grip him. He quite often wanted to cry, after, and even though this had been with another person, which everyone said was better, this was still like that, and he hated it. Adam was looking down at all of him, and that didn’t feel good anymore. “But it was mainly your fault, you know, saying those things.”

 

He laid his head back on the bed, closed his eyes, tried so hard to breathe and not to shout. It really was Adam’s fault, all Adam’s fault, but it wasn’t OK to be cross with Adam when Adam had only meant to be nice.

 

He had wanted to be nice to Elias, and Elias would have had nice things from him, and Elias had got it all wrong. Again.

 

After a moment, Elias felt a soft touch to his cheek. Then fingers were smoothing the damp hair off his hot forehead.

 

“Hey. Never mind, I guess.” Adam was saying. He sounded tired. “It’s just not my day.”

 

Elias opened his eyes, chewing on his lip and thinking.

 

“Can I put another finger in you again instead?” he suggested. “You like that, correct?”

 

Adam tilted his head, staring down at him. “Yeah, but I was under the impression you didn’t.”

 

Elias gave half a shrug, holding his gaze earnestly. “You like it,” he pointed out again. And it wasn’t so bad, really. He didn’t mind it, as such. It was sad, thinking of how his penis wouldn’t go in there now, but this wasn’t one of the things it helped at all to be sad about.

 

“OK,” Adam had started smiling a bit, the corners of his mouth twitching up but his eyes warmer too. “OK, sure, go for it, OK… uh, uh, OK, yes, mmm.”

 

Elias had reached around him and found his way back, and pressed through at once. There was an angle that had made different noises come from Adam than the rest, and he tried to find it again.

 

Or even better, repeat whatever it was he’d done that had made Adam call him ‘good’.

 

“Fuck. Holy loving motherfuck,” Adam was back in English. He’d dropped his head forward once more, weaving on his elbows braced either side of Elias’ body on the mattress. His mouth was low, near to Elias’ throat, and Elias could feel the heat of his breath. “Mmmm, come on, deeper, deeper.”

 

Adam’s penis was pressing more or less to Elias’ belly, so that was weird, but again, Elias didn’t really, really mind. His own penis was tender now that it was soft, but Adam rubbing against it still felt more pleasant than not.

 

“Yeah, yeah!” Adam’s whole body was moving rhythmically, rocking on Elias’ fingers. “Oh fuck, yes! That’s so good!”

 

Elias had tried a fourth finger. Apparently that had been a sensible guess.

 

Adam was pretty much kissing his throat now, pressing blindly against it with hot lips. Elias could barely move, he didn’t want one bit of what was happening to change but it would, and so he needed to memorise all of this, exactly this.

 

Adam’s noises were breaking, more just sounds now than words.

 

Elias made another guess, and arched his back, making his belly a firmer place for Adam to rub into as Elias clenched his abdominal muscles.

 

“Oh fucking Christ yes,” Adam said, and spurted all over them both. His bottomhole clenched down on Elias’s fingers, tight, so tight.

 

Elias risked trying to put an arm around him, just very slightly. The arm that wasn’t attached to the hand still trapped inside, that was. For long moments, Adam trembled against Elias’ body and let himself be held. It was splendid.

 

Elias looked dazedly at flock wallpaper of the hotel room ceiling, and wondered, not without a little fear, whether anything that felt this good could actually be real.

 

“Oh my God, you’re hard again now?”

 

Elias shifted. “I am not in control of that, so I cannot really apologise. It just happens.”

 

“Why didn’t you say you were so quick to reboot? I could have waited.”

 

Elias didn’t know how to answer that. The ground rules had been far from clear. It wasn’t his fault. Indignation rose.

 

“Fuck it. Next time though.” Adam muttered, and smiled sleepily. Then, without warning, he put his hand on Elias’ penis, his mouth on Elias’ nipple, and clutched, and bit.

 

Elias came; fast, hard, in some volume. His vision whited out.

 

After a while he was aware of Adam chuckling – and he sounded happy enough, despite the mess. Then Adam grabbed some tissues from a box by the bed and wiped them both perfunctorily, chucked them on the floor and then rolled onto his back. “Sleep if you like, I’m going to.”

 

And with that he was out, breathing gently.

 

Elias fought to stay awake, to keep enjoying this moment, even as warmth crept over him.

 

Adam had said _next time._

 

-


	4. Chapter 4

Adam woke up to loud snoring, and a slightly strange smell that it took a moment for him to place.

 

He recognised only as he blinked and breathed more deeply, the musk of male sweat and sex, and the unmistakable undertone of someone who has thought nothing of farting in bed after eating a kebab.

 

Adam pressed his head into the cool fabric of the pillow. What the fuck had he been thinking last night?

 

He waited for the hangover to kick in but three, five, ten, twenty seconds later it still hadn’t. He felt tired, sure - and sore, more than a little, in an irritatingly pleasant way, a nice deep burn in all the right places - but clearly he hadn’t been drunk, or not much. Not taken anything else, either, thank fuck, because that was a three-ring circus of despair he didn’t need to be back in anytime soon.

 

Disjointed images streamed back into his mind: the restaurant, the kebab shop, Elias - strange and strangely careful Elias, his face contorted with confusion as he pushed his fingers deeper and deeper into Adam’s arse, until finally the flush of pleasure had come – even though Elias hadn’t - and Elias’ smile, a soft smile all like wonder, hitched in that cleft lip.

 

Elias’ cock: thick, hot, huge. Adam sighed a little, shifting his body against the sheets with sensuous abandon. That cock was still in bed with him, right there to be taken. His hole twitched.

 

 _Freja._ Adam froze, stomach churning as the next round of memory splattered through his consciousness. Ugh, God, Freja. Erik. They might have put something on twitter, on Facebook, on any one of the many places he was known professionally. He could be a laughing stock across half the globe by now.

 

Even remembering the whole Freja situation depressed him. He’d come to Denmark expecting to stay with her as usual - in the place they’d started fixing up together although it belonged to her. This hotel room was an unexpected change, the first place he’d found when she’d kicked him and most of his stuff out, and not one he could really afford.

 

It was a dizzying sensation, like teetering on an edge, how wrong everything was going. He’d thought he was through that part of his life. He’d thought he’d finally got everything on track. It felt, now, like that had been only drawing a veil over his face so as not to look out at the darkness.

 

Fucking writer-brain and fucking metaphors – Adam rolled his eyes at himself, and felt them burn against the inside of his lids.

 

He propped himself up on his hands, then winced and made himself climb out of bed and wander to the bathroom. He was semi-aroused from the slight, lovely soreness he still felt in his arse, and had to wait, feet on cold tile, until he could relax enough to piss. He needed a shower, and he hadn’t been able to help noticing as he’d passed that Elias _really_ needed a shower – the man’s chest hair was all gunky with come, from both of them.

 

Seriously, honestly, what the actual fuck had he been thinking?

 

Washing his hands, Adam splashed his face with cold water, and then came back across to the bed, feeling irritated and itchy in his skin.

 

“Shower time, if you’re having one,” he said, and pulled the covers the rest of the way down and off Elias’ body, exposing him completely.

 

Really, it wasn’t such an unattractive physique, at least if you ignored his head.

 

One of Elias’ heads. Holy Fuck, the man had been blessed. Despite everything, Adam felt heat run down to his toes at the sight.

 

He straightened his shoulders though, and set his jaw. “Come on, I’m checking out of here at eleven.”

 

He’d leave, that’s what he’d do. Leave the hotel and the city and this country. Go back to London and try and find somewhere to crash, see if Denise would let him sofa surf for a while. Keep trying with the article series, and fuck every person he could find until Freja was out of his system. Keep on, keep up, keep trying… It had to work, in the end, somehow. He didn’t need anyone else, not really. And he wouldn’t fall down again, he wouldn’t, not ever...

 

“Elias!” he shouted, and that, finally, got a response, in the form of an even louder snore and then a sudden jerk into life so violent Adam automatically stepped back.

 

Elias’ response to be woken was to look around himself rapidly, nervously, hands raised in a boxer’s pose as if to protect himself.

 

Suddenly, Adam felt kind of shitty.

 

“Elias?” he said again, much more quietly, and tried to make himself be patient. “Listen, there’s two hours till I’m checking out of here. You can shower before you go but it has to be now.”

 

Elias looked at him, blinked, rubbed his eyes, and looked again.

 

He had such wide, dark eyes, Adam thought. They spoke a lot better than when he tried to use words.

 

“You said we were going to have sex again, though.” Elias said now, proving the point. He sounded a bit uncertain, but stubborn, like a child. “Or do we have sex after the shower? Or in the shower?”

 

He didn’t exactly sound hopeful.

 

Adam stared at him, and tried to marshal some emotional energy. He should have made himself a coffee before embarking on this.

 

“I don’t feel like sex this morning,” he said.

 

Elias’ eyes flickered, rather pointedly, to his half-hard cock. Elias, Adam noticed, was getting thicker too.

 

“My body feels like sex, I don’t.” Adam clarified. Then he sighed. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I just feel… sad this morning.”

 

That was more honest than he’d meant to be. He shook his head, trying to get his brain in gear.

 

Elias visibly relaxed, but then frowned, and shifted to sit on the edge of the bed, one leg crossed over the other. “Can I help you not to feel sad? It’s awful feeling sad, I hate it. Although I am very rarely sad, because of how satisfying my life is and how I have very many friends.”

 

Adam couldn’t help a wry grin. “Oh you say that to people too, do you?”

 

He went to sit on the bed as well, next to where Elias was still making an apparent - and unsuccessful - attempt to cover himself. “Yeah,” Adam continued, “I say that all the time myself. But it isn’t true, is it?’

 

“Are you calling me a liar?”

 

“I’m calling myself one. I guess you can be one, if I am.”

 

Elias frowned again, and rubbed at his top lip. “Have you lied to me?”

 

“I don’t think so. Probably a bit, the way people do. I think I say on my profile that I’m a famous journalist, and I’m not, not really. I mean I am a journalist but…” he sighed, and leant back on his hands on the mattress, looking over at the awful framed art the hotel had hung on the wall opposite. “But then I didn’t get much chance to tell any lies, last night, because you kept talking.”

 

Elias flinched, and Adam felt like a shitbag again.

 

“Hey,” he sat forward. “I’m being truthful. Truth isn’t always very nice. That’s one reason why someone might lie.”

 

“Did you really like what we did last night, though?” Elias asked after a moment, hesitant and very earnest.

 

“Yeah.” Adam shrugged, stretched, like the truth of that flow through his limbs for a moment. “I liked it a lot. But I…” he collapsed backwards, making the mattress bounce. “Maybe I do want to fuck. I don’t know. I don’t know what I want and that’s driving me as mad as anything else, and that is the truth. I thought I had my life figured out and really I… Fuck. I want some caffeine.”

 

The mattress moved again. Elias had got up. To get away from his pile of patheticness, Adam assumed, and stared at the ceiling. The flock patterns swam slightly before his eyes in a rising tide of self-pity.

 

Then there was a noise. A click, a patter of feet, the bathroom door opening, the tap running, another click, then a muted roaring gurgle as if…

 

Adam sat up.

 

Elias was crouched, naked, dick and balls swinging dangerously low to the carpet, and making coffee.

 

Adam felt weird again. But a better weird, now. A weird he didn’t want to examine. He sat still, where he was, watching, and saw Elias put the sachets of instant granules in the mugs, and wait for the kettle to boil, and pour out, and stir in the UHT milk.

 

“Thank you.” Elias had come over to the bed again, coffee in hand. Adam took it. It looked too strong and kind of grey, and had flecks of undissolved grains on the top.

 

“Really, that’s great, thank you,” Adam said again, and sipped, watching over the top of the cup for Elias’ face, feeling an answering flush in his own face at the reaction to the praise. “Aren’t you going to drink your own?”

 

Elias twisted his feet. “I don’t like coffee.”

 

“Oh. OK.”

 

“It seemed more normal to make two.”

 

“Right.”

 

Elias threw his hands up violently, and twisted away completely, bright red now. “Got that wrong,” he muttered.

 

Adam wondered all over again what the hell he thought he was doing, but he set his cup down all the same - he’d drunk more than half, it was actually kind of OK to taste, and the warmth was very soothing- and went over to touch Elias gently on the shoulder.

 

Elias turned back. “Are you still sad?” he demanded.

 

The automatic denials rose in Adam’s mouth. The kind of thing he would have said to Freja, to pretty much anyone else who might ever have pushed him with a question like that.

 

But Elias, wide-eyed, didn’t want him to lie. Elias, rude, abrupt, didn’t make Adam feel he had to tell a lie just to preserve the other person’s state of mind, and how strangely comforting that was.

 

Adam sighed, opened his hands. “I’m confused.”

 

“Why?”

 

“If I knew why, I wouldn’t be confused.”

 

Elias narrowed his eyes, considering, and then nodded briskly. Then he coughed, and looked away. Adam could figure out why that was at least - they were standing close again, and Elias’ anatomy apparently was well aware of the fact.

 

“Why don’t you go and shower?” Adam said, not unkindly – not without a shiver of wanting fighting back against his emotions - “Jack off in there if you like, I’m not bothered. I’m a mess, I’m sorry, I’m just not... “

 

Elias’ eyes were very wide now, and blinked fast. His shoulders slumped. “No,” he said, almost to himself. “No I suppose not. It was never to be.” He took a deep breath and looked Adam in the eye. “I have heard what you have told me and I respect your personal space,” he said, like reciting a line in a play, and shuffled off to the bathroom, closing the door behind him.

 

The gasping sounds that soon echoed forth over the sounds of the water could almost have been pain.

 

Adam found himself lying over the bed again, on his side now, and staring at his coffee cup.

 

The walls were closing in, like five years ago - he could feel it, slip-sliding darker, deeper around him. He’d thought he was over this, over letting stuff get to him this way. That he had become, at last, the suave give-no-shits take-no-prisoners guy he’d always made a play of being.

 

And yet, somehow, when that damn coffee cup came back into his line of sight, he smiled a little. _Didn’t even like coffee!_ It was so totally dumb and yet…

 

The water was still running. Adam rolled over and went off the bed to his jacket, and fished out his phone.

 

He ignored the notifications from twitter altogether. He swiped through his emails - nothing he cared about, no sign of any work - and checked his bank balance. There was a transfer from Random House from that editing job which he’d totally forgotten about.

 

He couldn’t take it any longer - he checked his messages. Mostly nonsense and various people’s circle-jerk of self-promotion. But there, sure enough, was Freja in the middle of it all.

 

 _So_ @toweringadam, _you trade a woman for a bull in a china shop? If you like dick I guess so._

 

There was a photo of Elias on the floor with the tray of smashed glasses on the floor, looking bewildered, and then one of Adam talking to him - they’d been caught in a split second where it looked like their heads were close together, intimate.

 

Not that many people had noticed it yet – his regular trolls, largely vocal objectors to his views on LGBT rights, mostly lived on the other side of the Atlantic and wouldn’t yet be awake, but over a hundred likes and fifty-seven retweets was still too many.

 

Throwing the phone down, Adam went and finished his coffee. Then he drank the other cup. For some unknowable reason Elias had put sugar in this one and not the other. But that was good, Adam wanted the energy.

 

Energy, purpose, fight - he’d get through this, he’d beat this, he’d fucking show them all. He could do anything he bloody well wanted to!

 

When the bathroom door opened, Adam was half dressed and mostly packed.

 

“Hey Elias,” he said, and turned.

 

And stopped for a moment. Elias’ hair was wet, and plastered over his head, the permed curls tamped down. It was a… different effect.

 

Elias, wrapped in a towelling robe, was looking back at him with mostly a frown. There was always that impression the shape of his lip gave that meant he looked sneering, but Adam had started to get used to that.

 

Elias’ shoulders were still curled in. Water was dripping down his leg hair and onto the carpet. His toes were long and pale.

 

Adam set his shoulders back, tossed his head. “How about coming and fucking me in the penthouse suite?”

 

-


	5. Chapter 5

Elias was far from sure he’d really heard what he thought he’d heard.

 

As he waited, trying to figure out what to say to figure out whether he had, Adam’s face changed, and Elias struggled to read his expression. The change was not the sort of sudden or mocking one that would have made it clear that the suggestion had been a joke.

 

A few seconds ticked by. Adam definitely looked unhappy, now.

 

“Sorry, I’m still reeling, I can’t…” Adam waved one hand by his head and started turning away. “I guess, if you don’t want to…”

 

“I want to!” Elias said. Shouted. Couldn’t help shouting, it was very important to be clear. It was OK to shout sometimes, when the situation warranted it.

 

He really wasn’t clear himself on what was happening, though. People said, on TV shows and in jokes, that it was always complicated for men to date women because women were mysterious and hard to understand, but Elias couldn’t see that Adam was any better. Maybe that was a gay thing.

 

And Elias had been touching a gay man, hadn’t he? Had touched himself in the shower just now thinking about the face and bottom of a gay man. That seemed like quite a gay thing too.

 

But not Adam’s penis, of course. Elias hadn’t touched Adam’s penis. Or anyway, touching with his body didn’t count, that had just been mostly accidental, only touching with his hand would actually be gay.

 

Adam wanting Elias’ penis inside him, that didn’t count either. So all of that side of things was still fine, and not anything he needed to worry about.

 

Trying to shake off the disconcerting questions, Elias looked around for his clothes. They looked rather sad, in a heap on the floor. There was a brown bloodstain on the front of his best jacket. They were his best clothes, his favourite, nicest, newest and most comfortable ones, but he could see that they weren’t like the clothes Adam had worn the night before, or the ones he’d put on now. Whilst Elias had been in the shower, Adam had got into a pair of dark blue jeans so tight they might have been painted on. He looked like a model in a fashion advert.

 

Elias frowned, and tried to think clearly, and not just about how Adam looked, and about how it made him feel that Adam had said he wanted to have more sex with Elias, still.

 

“You said you were leaving the hotel,” Elias pointed out. “So did you really mean just leaving this room? You should be more specific, Adam, it’s very confusing otherwise.”

 

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to confuse you.” Adam was putting more things into his cases. Quite a lot of stuff, Elias noticed, had been piled into plastic laundry bags with the hotel logo on and thrown over to the corner. There was an artificial Christmas wreath with plastic bristles sticking out, and the square boxes of CDs and lots of pieces of paper with annotated type in English.

 

Adam was moving oddly, in sudden fits and starts, and he was very pale in his face apart from high, intense red spots on the top of each cheek.

 

“I’m not confused!” Elias told him now, firmly. “But someone easily could be if you keep contradicting yourself this way.” He paused, uneasy. He drew his bathrobe closer about him and tried to straighten his shoulders. He didn’t really like being undressed when Adam was clothed, but he didn’t quite want to change in front of him. No one talked about this side of things with sex, about all the getting into and out of the room. In movies there was some sort of montage and that was it. There were never bits of old tissue on the floor, in movies.

 

Elias stayed in the robe, in the end - somehow the moment to change never came up, Adam never letting up from moving fast and darting about, and wanting to be on their way.

 

And so Elias walked down to the hotel lobby with Adam in the robe still, his clothes all haphazard and bundled up in his arms, and then watched at the desk as Adam paid for one room and asked to check into the bigger one upstairs. Adam had just the two suitcases, everything else he’d left in the hotel room with a wave of his hand.

 

The man behind the desk kept staring at Elias. A woman came to stand next to him, and giggled behind her hand. Elias didn’t like her at all. Then another man, very smart, came to the desk too and murmured something.

 

“Does it take three people to make a booking for you?” Elias asked Adam, loudly. He was getting cold. People kept walking past and staring.

 

“This is a nice hotel, sir,” said the smart man. He wasn’t looking at either of them, more of the middle distance in the air between where they stood. “A family hotel. We really don’t appreciate this kind of… demonstration.” He shot a glance at Elias.

 

Elias shifted his feet on the carpet, digging his fingers into his bundle of clothing. “What are you trying to say to me?” he demanded.

 

Adam put a hand on Elias’ arm. That felt nice, quite warm. “He’s trying to be a dick,” Adam said, “but I have money, and that’s what really matters, isn’t it, in the end?” He was talking to the smart man by the end of his sentence, and he sounded cross.

 

“Nobody here wants a scene,” the smart man said, and he smiled a very nasty smile.

 

Elias looked at the people behind the desk. Adam’s credit card was sitting on the side, not being put in the machine to pay for the room. The woman was giggling - another woman had come to stand beside her.

 

Adam was pink on the tips of his ears, and breathing oddly, like he was just as eager to start hitting people as Elias felt. Or perhaps about to be upset - those two feelings went together a lot, actually, in Elias’ experience.

 

“This is ridiculous,” Elias said, as loudly as he could without it being really shouting. That made the people behind the desk jump a bit, which was pleasing but also scary, mostly because it was pleasing.

 

So Elias turned to face into Adam instead, and risked putting his hand on Adam’s arm, bundle of clothing carefully balanced. “We’re never going to get to have sex if we stay here, Adam. And I want my breakfast too.” He took a deep breath, tried to gather up his courage. He didn’t want to look gay in front of all these stupid people, but then they were stupid, and Adam was looking so strange, and Elias wanted sex, and food, so he could say this. “Why don’t we go to my flat? I have an amazing flat over near the Amagerfælled and we could go there instead.”

 

Adam looked up at him. His mouth had fallen slightly open. Close to, you could see the way his stubble had made a very slight shading across his face. Elias hadn’t really taken in, before, that he was taller than Adam. Of course he was taller than a lot of men, but it felt different with Adam. Less like it was important that Elias would be stronger _than_ him, and more like he could be strong _for_ him, and around him.

 

“Yeah?” Adam said, and sighed. He put his head in his hands for a moment. “Fuck, God, what am I doing? Yeah. OK.”

 

“Are you OK? Really?” it was awkward, to be raising his arm when he was still trying to hold onto his clothes, but Elias reached out further so that he could squeeze Adam’s shoulder. “You are so confusing this morning.”

 

There was another burst of giggling from behind the desk. Elias turned to glare, but was distracted by Adam taking his hand into his own.

 

Adam’s eyes were wide. “I am a bit of a mess, aren’t I?”

 

“Not really.” Elias tilted his head, tried to weigh it up truthfully. “You look very nice. Very attractive, although of course you didn’t shower, so here close to I can smell the remainder of the dried semen on your skin. But actually I think I like that.”

 

Adam broke into a smile, and a small laugh of his own. This laugh was nice. Then he made the turn to look at the desk staff again.

 

“Yeah,” Adam said, “you fucking heard that. Well fuck you. We’re going to his place. I’ll send you a fucking photo, it’ll last longer.”

 

He took up the handles of his suitcases and led the way out of the wide automatic doors. Elias stopped for a moment to toe on his trainers before attempting the pavement, and then followed, little shocks of excitement thrilling through him.

 

-

 

They had got almost to the harbour crossing at Langebro when Adam stopped his rapid walking, and Elias, who had moved to be walking in front since he knew the way, had to stop and turn and see why he’d slowed.

 

Adam looked good in the morning light, with the yellow sunshine coming through his hair as the wind ruffled the curls. Elias wished that he’d had a chance to put on his own trousers. The bathrobe was distinctly draughty.

 

Adam gave a small laugh, and waved his hand. “You know you don’t actually have to take me all the way to your house, right?”

 

Elias frowned. “Don’t you want to come there anymore?”

 

“No! I mean, yes, I mean…” Adam bit his lip, and sat down on a nearby bollard. He dragged his hand over his face again. “Thank you, for offering. I had got myself in such a state, back in there, and I… Fuck.”

 

Elias folded his arms, trying to be patient. “Could you please just explain to me what the problem is? Because I can’t keep up with you always saying things and then other things like you do. Is something wrong, Adam?”

 

“Isn’t that obvious?” Adam laughed again, the same high-pitched, quick, anxious thing. “And I can’t believe I’m telling you all this. I’ve known you less than twenty-four hours. You’re my date, sort of, I guess, and usually? Usually I have a very strict policy on not letting my dates know how fucked up I am for the longest time possible.”

 

“It’s not good to say nasty things about yourself,” Elias pointed out. “It doesn’t help.”

 

“I guess not.”

 

“But it can be hard not to do that.” Elias considered. “But you shouldn’t be, all the same. And anyway there’s nothing wrong with you. Maybe you could learn better Danish so it’s easier for me to understand you. But that’s a small improvement. The cherry on the cake.”

 

“You didn’t think I was pretty strange in there? Back at the hotel?” Adam’s eyes were wide, staring at Elias. “I can get like that. It’s… kind of a mood thing, I get these… I can’t figure out how seriously to take what my gut is telling me to do. Like. Impulses. I just find myself convinced that I have to… It all seems like such a good idea, and then I take a step back, and I realise... “ He sighed loudly, and looked away, and then around the street.

 

“And the fact of the matter is,” Adam continued, “I don’t usually have someone there to rescue me like you did.”

 

Elias felt warm all over, very suddenly and very completely.

 

What Adam had said, he thought he could see. To do something, and then wish you hadn’t, and to wish you’d understood about how you would end up wishing not to before you’d started – he’d had that experience himself. And it didn’t feel good at all, not being sure of yourself. He’d been so sure, in the summer, of all kinds of things, and most of them hadn’t been true, all around the one awful thing that was real even though he hadn’t wanted it to be.

 

“It isn’t really a proper rescue until you’ve been looked after, with a blanket and so on, and tea,” Elias argued. “Come to my flat. It’s really nice.”

 

He got a hand free again from the clothes he carried and held it out impulsively, before remembering that with two suitcases to pull, Adam wouldn’t be able to hold hands with him as they walked even if he wanted to.

 

Adam took it, though, and stared at him a bit longer. It felt very good where they touched. Adam’s hand was cold – Elias imagined pulling it in close to his mouth, breathing warm air onto it.

 

He wanted Adam in his flat, where he could in fact put a blanket on him – the thought arrived clear and fully formed, and very determined.

 

“Come on!” Elias encouraged him, and started up walking, pausing a moment to let Adam get his suitcases again.

  
They set off once more.

 

It began to occur to Elias, having crossed the harbour, and the nearer they got to his flat, that whilst his was clearly the best flat in the world except for maybe Gabriel’s, Adam might not be able to see this. That Adam might think the place was small, because he wouldn’t appreciate that it was compact and efficient. That Adam might be one of those people who liked to have new kitchen appliances and shiny surfaces and things, when that was just a waste of good money. That the sheets on the bed hadn’t been changed in a couple of weeks, and that Adam might think that wasn’t very polite.

 

He thought for a moment of the feasibility of trying to take Adam to Gabriel’s larger, tidier house instead. But whilst Gabriel would obviously do anything for Elias, Evelyn might not like it. And Evelyn might be there. And it wouldn’t be nice for Adam to have to meet Evelyn.

 

Elias shot a glance at where Adam was walking steadily beside him, face a more natural colour now. Adam looked back, and grinned.

 

Elias would just have to hope for the best.

 

-

 

When they got into the flat, Adam didn’t say anything at first. He looked at the living room and through the hatch to the kitchen, but he just sat on the sofa without a word, and let out a long breath. He was pink, now, with walking, and sweating a little – Elias would offer the blanket later.

 

“Would you like a drink?” Elias asked. “I have biscuits too. Sweet biscuits and savoury biscuits. Of the sweet biscuits there are chocolate and ginger, and there are cheese ones for savoury. Or,” a happy thought occurred to him, and he looked up eagerly, “I can make that breakfast that we haven’t had yet.”

 

“Um, yes, I suppose so? That does sound good. Like what?”

 

“I think cheese omelettes,” Elias said quickly. “I know how to cook many things very well, of course, but Gabriel, my brother Gabriel, he always says to do the omelettes.”

 

“Sounds like a plan to me.” Adam stretched back where he sat. “Nice sofa.” He gave another short, strange laugh.

 

“Yes, it is quite new actually,” Elias put his clothes down on a kitchen chair and went to open the fridge. “We had to replace that because Dad had the stroke on it and the old one got very stained. He was lying there a whole night, you see.”

 

Adam sat up straight again, and looked at the sofa, and then the carpet. “This was your Dad’s flat?”

 

“No. That is not precisely correct. He wasn’t my Dad. Well, he was my primary male caregiver, but it turned out he wasn’t my biological father. He left a message to tell us this, after he died. He wasn’t my father, or Gabriel’s, we were both adopted from an orphanage somewhere.”  Elias stopped, and breathed again. It was OK. It was OK. What Dad had said didn’t stop anything and it didn’t change anything. “But Gabriel is still my brother,” he said, just to be entirely clear. “Your family isn’t about DNA and genes and mitochondria, it is about the people who care about you and Gabriel and I care about each other very much and we would never stop being brothers, whether or not we have any of the same parents.”

 

He stared at Adam, hoping the point had been made beyond the possibility of discussion. He didn’t want to end up getting cross.

 

But Adam just shrugged. He rested back once more, and sighed. “I wish I had more people who cared about me, instead of just ones I share DNA with.”

 

Elias came over from the kitchen area. He pulled one of the blankets from the pile on the chair, and went to drape it over where Adam lay. “Gabriel and I are the best brothers in the whole world,” he said comfortingly, “so really it wouldn’t be as good for anyone else in any other family, whatever happened. Now I think you should sleep for a while, because you seem to be very overtired.”

 

Adam smiled at him, but to Elias’ annoyance sat up again instead of letting himself be tucked in. “Maybe I should take that shower you mentioned. Don’t want to make you sofa smell, if it’s new.”

 

“I do like how you smell,” Elias reiterated. “It is just quite strong. I didn’t mean to be rude when I said that.”

 

Adam stood up, and kissed his cheek.

 

It was quick and sudden and warm and slightly damp. His lips were soft. He had kissed Elias just under his cheekbone, on the side where the cleft pulled. By the time Elias had finished feeling it, Adam was drawing away.

 

“Shower through there is it?” Adam asked, pointing. “Is that OK? Can I have a towel?”

 

“Um,” Elias squeezed past him and dashed into the bathroom. He took a quick look around and shoved the hand lotion and the wipes in the cupboard, and took the two magazines in the rack by the loo out and hid them in the robe he was still wearing. They were both full of pictures of girls with their tops off, and he didn’t want Adam to think Elias would be sad because he, Adam, didn’t have breasts.

 

Elias reflected that he really was barely sad at all that Adam didn’t have breasts. That was possibly a bit strange, but also probably a good thing, one way or another.

 

After all, it wouldn’t matter about being gay, if you liked being gay, would it?

 

“There you are,” Elias said, coming out again. “I sprayed some air freshener for you. Just to be hospitable, it is not that the bathroom usually smells. And also the air freshener doesn’t smell of anything, so you won’t actually be able to tell I did it, but it just makes it all nicer and that is what I was doing.”

 

“Thank you,” Adam said, and smiled some more, but although Elias waited very still, he didn’t kiss him again, just went in and closed the bathroom door behind him.

 

-

 

The omelettes were quite good, Elias thought. He had remembered to leave the chipotle hot sauce on the side rather than just mix it in how he personally liked it. The toast was pretty much not burned at all. He’d found two nice plates with flowers on that had belonged to his Mum – accurately speaking, the lady who had been his primary female caregiver, as he explained to Adam.

 

“Did she live here too? Were they here together?” Adam asked, wiping up the last of his eggs with a forkful of toast. Elias watched that quite proudly, and then thought about the question, and bit his lip.

 

“No. She died a long time ago. We were quite young then.”

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

“I’m sorry about it too.” Elias picked his own plate up and went to the sink and ran the tap. The scrubbing brush hanging on its hook had been Dad’s - there was still the bend in the handle where Elias had accidentally melted it a bit, putting it on the edge of a hot frying pan when he was nine. _Isn’t it obvious you don’t do that?_ Dad had yelled at him, and slapped his head. _Why can’t I have a normal kid like anyone would actually want?_

 

Elias looked at the running water, and did breathing.

 

“You said you worked in chemical engineering, before,” he heard Adam saying from behind him. “What about now? Will they be OK, whoever they are, with you not showing up today?”

 

“I work in a packing warehouse, in the IKEA ceramic outlet.” Elias went and got Adam’s plate and added it to the water in the sink. It splashed a bit, but he’d got dressed back into his clothes, so that didn’t matter much. “I could work anywhere I like,” he said, turning round and leaning back against the countertop. “I like to work there, because it’s outside town so I get to ride out on the bus and see the scenery.”

 

“In London, you’re always on the Underground. No scenery there. Well. Tunnel walls. And it smells.”

 

“Do you normally live in London?” Elias ran the tap again and then turned back around, picking up the dishcloth to dry his hands, thinking hard. They were making small talk, he was pretty sure, and he didn’t want to say the wrong thing. You were supposed to ask questions about the other person’s life, but only certain ones. Just a bit wrong could be very, very wrong. He’d learnt that with Evelyn. Why asking if someone had a cold was OK, but asking if their ovulation hurt wasn’t, he was pretty sure he’d never figure out.

 

On the other hand, he and Adam had already said all kinds of things to each other that you wouldn’t just say to anyone, normally.

 

“Most of the time in London, yeah,” Adam was saying. “Or I was there, mostly, until… Well. Like I said, I’m a reporter. I travel a lot. Depends where the story takes me.”

 

Elias nodded.

 

Adam had been looking up at him, arms folded. Now he sighed and put his hands flat on the top of the formica table. He’d retrieved one of his cases whilst Elias had been cooking, and had emerged from his shower in an open-necked shirt and another tight pair of jeans. Dressed like that, Elias had been able to see the movement of his throat, whenever he’d swallowed a bite of omelette, and the way his thighs flexed and twitched nervously now.

 

Just having him sitting there, in what was now Elias’ kitchen, in the room where once Elias had wandered up and down waiting and waiting and waiting for the ambulance with Gabriel, after Dad, was very strange.

 

Elias would have worried more he was imagining it somehow, if he hadn’t felt sure he couldn’t have imagined someone like Adam.

 

“Is there a story here?” Elias asked him, because you picked up the last thing a person had said and you asked them about that, and that way you had conversation.

 

“I didn’t think there was. I didn’t really come here for work this time, I came to see… well, she’s my ex-girlfriend now, I guess.”

 

Elias laughed.

 

“Why is that funny?”

 

“I know you’re gay.” Elias wagged his finger. “You can’t fool me.”

 

“I’m not, actually.” Adam stood up, pushing his chair back, and Elias felt a brief, disconcerting panic. But, “I’m bisexual,” Adam said next, like that would explain things. “That means I like to date men and women.”

 

“Is that allowed?”

 

Adam grinned. Elias didn’t quite like that. “As far as I know.”

 

“You’re laughing at me.”

 

Adam frowned, got up from the table and came the few steps over to stand next to him. “I’m sorry. Only because… It doesn’t matter. I don’t think less of you. I’m sorry you didn’t know that a guy could date men and women if he wanted to.”

 

“Like me,” Elias pointed out. “Because I have dated many, many women. And now there’s you.”

 

A frown passed over Adam’s face, and he tilted his head on the side.

 

Elias wondered if this was the kind of silence where you were allowed to try and kiss someone, if they’d let you. Adam looked like he wasn’t sure that they were dating, and Elias wanted him to be sure of that.

 

Adam was very close to him. It wouldn’t take much to get closer. Elias could just lean across.

 

Adam smelt of soap now. Elias’ soap, that Elias had picked out and bought and carried home. The soap that Elias was used to smelling on his own hands after he’d touched himself, until the soap scent smelt a bit like sex to him.

 

Adam’s throat was graceful, and bare, and there was a pink flush between the tendons.

 

Adam wasn’t moving away.

 

Elias took a deep breath.

 

Abruptly, there was a loud knocking at the door.

 

-


	6. Chapter 6

“I’m just saying,” said the brother - Gabriel, and fuck if Adam didn’t know his name by now - “that I don’t want anyone winding up getting hurt.” He spread his hands, almost apologetic. “That’s all I’m saying.”

 

Adam shifted guiltily from one foot to the other where he stood in Elias’ tiny living area, and winced. He felt profoundly awkward. His conversation with Gabriel up to this point had been bad enough - he was pretty sure Gabriel had no right to go around telling random people his brother’s psychiatric history, even for what he thought was his brother’s benefit – but now Adam himself was starting to feel like a shitbag again.

 

It had been so… strangely lovely, this night and day with Elias. But really that never could have been real or enduring, not this week of his life.

 

Not any week of Adam’s life.

 

“What did you say?” yelled a voice from the flat doorway, suddenly, half startling Adam from his skin.

 

“What did you just say, Gabriel?”

 

“Ah, Elias,” Gabriel turned, a smile plastered on his face. “Back from the shops with the milk already! We can have that tea, then.”

 

“Adam likes coffee,” Elias said, and he was sneering now, for sure. Then he fell back into agitation. “Gabriel! You mustn’t tell Adam that I will hurt him! That’s not fair! I certainly won’t!” He looked at Adam, eyes wide. “I certainly won’t, Adam, I never would, would I?”

 

Adam kept his eyes on the floor and coughed. The shitty, dark, oily crawling feeling was creeping back over him. He was so tired. He should have napped when Elias had offered – Elias, so gently offering him that blanket, Adam should have left right then, before making it all a hundred times worse.

 

Gabriel gave a short, ridiculous giggle. “I was talking about something else, Elias,” he protested, hands held up, placatory.

 

“Oh, well,” Elias waved other ideas away airily. “If you mean safe sex, we are going to do that. Very safe. I have bought another box of condoms at the corner shop just now, although I believe Adam has some with him anyway.”

 

“Ah,” said Gabriel, and gave the thinnest of smiles, and shot an accusing glance that Adam wilted under.

 

“And you don’t really mind, do you Gabriel?” Elias asked now, sounding concerned again. “About me having sex with a man?”

 

“Whatever you do, you will always be my big brother,” Gabriel said at once, almost formally, like the call and response in a religious ceremony. He was instantly enveloped in what looked like a bone-crushing hug, which he was almost as instantly trying to break free of.

 

It was surprising, Adam thought, how much there was to envy in these two awkward men embracing. OK, so neither of them had personal boundaries worth a damn and clearly the history between them wasn’t great at all, but each of them apparently had thought the other was worth making an effort for, in the end. Gabriel had come to check on his brother today after not getting an answer to a text for twelve hours – how many people would do the same, nowadays?

 

When Adam compared that to his own family, well, he’d take these oddballs and their weird mixture of disinhibition, shouting and therapy speak over icy silence, passive aggressive reproach and systematic lying any day.

 

Gabriel went to sit on the sofa, and Elias sat next to him. Adam moved some things off a chair, dislodging an old envelope covered in what looked like – as he studied it more carefully – obscene stick figure drawings. They were carefully numbered in order, and he couldn’t help noticing a step that involved the application of condoms.

 

Something started hurting in Adam’s chest, and he couldn’t swallow past it.

 

Elias’ flat was a million miles away from what Adam had become accustomed to - the chrome and glass and designer furniture, fake vintage lighting and art pieces that cost a lot and which no one in the place actually liked, which were the milieu of Adam’s friends and relations. And Elias could maybe have dusted more, sure, but his home wasn’t disgusting, and the piles of chemistry textbooks and notepads and old bits of folk art and battered childhood toys suggested a comfortable and settled feeling that Adam had almost forgotten ever knowing. Something, actually, that he felt pretty sure he could enjoy getting used to.

 

Not that he ever would, not if he did what Gabriel wanted.

 

And surely Gabriel would know what Elias needed better than Adam could hope to?

 

For Adam to have thought that he could understand someone, that he could connect with them in some wonderful, profound way after only knowing them a day? Surely that was ridiculous? And after - yes, it was true, all of what Gabriel had said was true – after wanting to meet Elias basically as a kind of animate sex toy, nothing more or less?

 

Such a crappy week, it had been, and Adam was still lurching from one emotional state to another, buffeted like a sailor, seasick with it. Elias might seem like something true and firm and constant, something bizarre but bright – wouldn’t a lighthouse always seem strange to a ship? – but who was Adam to try and make a good decision? He was just an idiot, drowning in his own metaphors.

 

Elias and Gabriel had moved to talking about something else neutral, something to do with paint ordering. Adam leant back in his chair as nonchalantly as he could, and made a show of checking his phone. That meant, unavoidably, seeing that Freja’s tweet was now well into triple figures, and that she’d sent a follow-up message direct to him: _Sorry to be harsh, darling, but it was the truth, wasn’t it? I had no idea that anyone would care._

 

Wanting to be sure of his response, demanding some kind of answer, some validation of what she’d done. Unable to resist another little dig in the end.

 

He’d thought he liked her, hadn’t he? Alright, when they’d met he’d been thinking a lot about how good they looked together at parties, and that she made a nice photo on his arm coming out of nightclubs…

 

… Elias, on his arm in public, by comparison? The mind boggled.

 

Adam locked the screen again and slid the phone into his pocket. Then he cleared his throat.

 

Part of his mind fretted, worrying that this was another impulse he ought to be thinking better of. Another part, a cold cruel part bred in the metropolitan wilds of wine bars and clubs, of hot, hotter, hottest and instagram brags and bed notches, wondered what the hell he’d ever been thinking, sticking around past the first time he’d laid eyes on his ‘date’.

 

“Yes, Adam?” Gabriel said in response to the cough, speaking with a near-theatrical level of unsubtlety. Adam had been fighting back hysteria in various ways all day long, and it rose again now, shaking at the foundations of his composure.

 

“Did you want to say something, Adam?” Gabriel asked again, prompting, raising his eyebrows warningly. “Was that a message you had there? Did something happen?”

 

 _I know what’s best for him_ , Gabriel had hissed in their hurried conversation earlier. _You don’t, you’re nothing to him and you don’t want him to be anything to you, do you? Well do you? Don’t play with me, Mr English City Guy, I know I’m ugly and I know my brother’s worse. I thought him getting what he wanted might be good, but he doesn’t need this, he doesn’t need you hanging about eating his food, taking his things – oh I saw the suitcases, don’t think I didn’t. A free bed in Copenhagen for a week? A month? And then what? You ought to be ashamed of yourself_.

 

It was that last that had hit closest to home. Adam had heard those words enough times for a deep groove to lie ever-present through his mind just waiting for them, a scar ready to break down and crack open.

 

 _Worthless, thoughtless, selfish boy_. Those words were stitched deep into his skin somewhere, burning and aching. He had to keep that covered, keep himself cold, keep safe from anything worse.

 

From doing anything worse, from hurting anyone with how he was.

 

 _It’s that child’s fault,_ his mother had said. _That boy rends me to my last nerve and as I said to my doctor, that’s almost certainly why the treatment didn’t work this time. If that child was only a little considerate! But of course, Henry never takes any trouble with him or can be bothered to teach him manners, he enjoys his golf course more than his son._

 

Elias had had to be sectioned, Gabriel had said, and barely six months ago. What if Adam made him worse again?

 

Adam stood up from his chair. This wasn’t easy - he was shaking slightly. The omelette had been sitting so happily in his gut - now he felt full of acid, ready to retch.

 

“I did have a message,” he said, and cleared his throat again. He blinked. He was pretty sure he was blushing, but this needed to appear natural. “It’s, er, that lady, from last night.” He risked shooting a glance at Elias.

 

Elias was watching him, impassive, looking only mildly interested, with no idea of what was to come.

  
Gabriel nodded at Adam encouragingly, just very slightly.

 

Adam took another breath, and clenched his fists at his sides. “She wants to… I need to talk to her about what happened and I guess… Well, actually, I probably ought to be thinking about getting in touch with the airline and changing my flight booking back to the UK to come earlier than planned, I mean, I don’t have a hotel now and I don’t want to take advantage of you here, and…” he shrugged, trailing off, and coughed and made another run at it. “It’s been very nice of you to help me out, this morning,” he said more coherently, and raised his head and tried looking at Elias for nearly two seconds together. “But maybe I should go now?”

 

Elias stood up fast, his eyes started wide.

 

Adam stared at him, feeling his heart beating in his throat fit to choke. His mind swam upstream once more through the torrent of arguments that would say this was the best thing to do, and that so it was better to get this over with.

 

“I do not want you to go.” Elias said, slowly, and more quietly than Adam had expected. “If you need to go and see someone, and you really have to do it now, that’s OK I suppose, but I want you to come back.” His eyes were welling up. “You’re not wanting to come back, though, are you?”

 

Adam sighed. “Elias…”

 

Elias had turned red. He raised his hand, pointing. “But you said…” he began, in a shout, and then bit his lip, stopped, swallowed whatever the rest of the sentence was.

 

Then he lowered his hand again, and frowned.

 

Then, each movement careful and deliberate, Elias came over the small distance to where Adam was standing and looked at him. Studied him, like he was some kind of statue, angling his head to stare from every side.

 

Slowly, Elias raised his hand and very, very gently brought it in to cup at Adam’s cheek.

 

Adam gazed at him. He could feel a tear rolling out of his eye and down his nose.

 

“Adam,” Elias said, in a whisper. “Do you need me to rescue you again?”

 

Part of Adam’s brain laughed, pushed him away, swanned off, gave no shits, took no prisoners, stayed cool, ruled London, fucking showed them all.

 

“Maybe?” Adam said, and his voice was thick. “Elias, I’m…”

 

“Confused?”

 

Swallowing, Adam nodded.

 

Elias drew him in then, into one of the tightest hugs Adam had ever experienced, Elias’ arms wrapped round him and one large, warm, dry hand going to the back of his neck.

 

Adam swayed into him, leant, melted.

 

He was warm, here, with Elias, pressed against Elias, listening to the rapid thud of Elias’ heart, carefully contained in Elias’ hold.

 

“I’m sorry about the behaviour of my penis at this moment also,” Elias was murmuring. “I don’t have control of it, you understand.”

 

Adam sniffed, and raised his own arms to draw Elias tighter to him. He’d had Elias’s fingers about a mile deep inside him, he could push his belly into an erection and not care.

 

Somewhere away from them, there was a high-pitched little cough.

 

Adam remembered Gabriel.

 

Now he did pull away from Elias, and was aware that he was blushing.

 

But Elias drew himself up, and turned to his brother. “I apologise, Gabriel. You have caught us at a complicated time. I am sure that you didn’t say anything to upset Adam when I was away because you sent me to get milk, but all the same I think I must politely ask you to leave us alone for a while, thank you.”

 

Gabriel’s eyes were wide. He blinked, swallowed, and gave a strange, strained cough.

 

He rallied though, and folded his arms. “You need to text me what is happening and that you’re alright, please,” he said to Elias, firmly. “You don’t know this man.”

 

“ _You_ don’t know this man,” Elias shot back. “Do you?”

 

“No. No, I suppose not.”

 

“Well,” Elias nodded. “Well, that is one of the things that are a problem in life that can be changed if you want to change them.”

 

Gabriel stared at him for another long moment, and then went for the door. Elias caught up with him, courteously opened it, then closed and locked it behind.

 

“My brother Gabriel is very, very wise,” Elias said as he turned back to look at Adam again. “It is not always a good thing, though.”

 

Adam was aware that he was laughing, that he had started laughing and wasn’t sure if he could stop. That he was shaking all over and that he felt so strange and so amazing and so much like he was going to collapse onto the floor.

 

In an instant, Elias was at his side, and guiding him back down to the sofa.

 

“Sit down, rest. Sleep. Please.” There was the blanket again. Elias was lifting up Adam’s legs, helping him to lie flat. “Rest now.”

 

-

 

When Adam woke up, his mouth dry apart from where he’d drooled and partially gummed himself to the sofa cushions, there was a soft, glowing light all around the room.

 

Sitting up, he scratched his hairline and yawned. He felt warm as toast – the blanket smelled a bit, minty, smoky and slightly fishy, but it was woollen and thick and had been pleasantly heavy. He noticed that it had been darned, in several places and by at least two different people. Some of the darns were neat and very fine, barely perceptible unless you were close to see them. Others were lumpy, and in the wrong colour wool, but they had been attempted all the same.

 

Adam sighed a little. Then, blinking, he looked up and across the room. There was the source of the light – candles on the table, two of them in tall, china candlesticks painted like dancing women, uneven heights but both burning merrily.

 

“How are you feeling now?” It was Elias, coming to him with a glass of something – apple juice, Adam realised, and gratefully gulped it down. Then, wiping the back of his hand over his mouth, he remembered more of everything that had happened, and wanted to hide under the blanket again.

 

But, “Better?” Elias was asking, with more evident nervousness now, leaning over him.

 

Adam gazed up, and found himself smiling. “A bit, yeah. That looks nice.” He gestured over at the table.

 

“Dinner,” said Elias proudly. Then, coughing, “I thought you might like pizza, most people like pizza.”

 

“Love pizza,” Adam assured him. He stood up and stretched. Yes, there, poking out of the kitchen bin were two Dominos boxes. On the table, two central serving plates had been covered with silver dishes, and there was a small glass vase with something in it that looked like strands of ivy. All that had been available from reaching out of the flat window, Adam deduced, and couldn’t help smiling again. The customary pizza sauces had been decanted into little ceramic dishes in the shape of ducklings.

 

“You have some lovely objects here.”

 

“They were all my mother’s. She liked things that were different from normal and ordinary things.” Elias eyes had gone very soft. “She said that if we were all the same, it would be the most boring and bad thing. So she had these, you see?” He pointed at the silver covers, and Adam saw that both were engraved with a coat of arms that had gone horribly wrong, lines lurching everywhere. “They were in a house sale on a grand estate, I think. The youngest son of a large, rich family thought he could be a metalworker only he wasn’t very good. My father would say these were very stupid and bad. But she said they were interesting.”

 

“I like them.” Adam smiled, and sat down. He was conscious of feeling the kind of gentle buzz he was used to getting only after exchanging a bundle of notes for a handful of pills.

 

He watched as Elias removed the silver covers and served the pizza slices, and declined an offer of additional cheese on the side but accepted an apple.   


Once less hungry, and refreshed, he didn’t think he could put it off any longer:

 

“I am sorry, Elias, about how I acted earlier.”

 

Elias looked at him fondly. “Thank you,” he said, in his courtly-formal way. “I am sorry that you felt so upset.” Then he calmly took another bite of pizza, like that was that.

 

“I upset you, though, and I… I never meant to suggest that I…” Adam sighed, set down his knife and fork. They had bone handles, yellowed with age, veined and cracked. “I, um… I was worried, about how I…” He cleared his throat, looked up as unwaveringly as he could. “You said you don’t want to hurt me. Well, I don’t want to hurt you. And I don’t have a very good track record, with relationships, or…”

  
Again, part of him wanted to baulk and run at using the word ‘relationship’ after barely a date and a half. But what use that had that part of him ever been in making him happier?

 

“I come with a lot of baggage,” Adam continued. “And I don’t just mean all those cases piled there behind me that have nowhere else to go. _I_ have nowhere else to go, Elias, other than back to London. I’m all washed up in Denmark. I’m not a good bet.”

 

Elias started saying something. Adam reached over and took his hand, grabbing his attention back, hoping Elias would understand the need for the interruption this once.

 

“And I’m a man, Elias. A queer man, and if you’re with me, around me, you’ll be queer too, and people will call you gay, and that’s just… you can’t opt out of that. I can’t be with someone who thinks they can opt out of that.”

 

Elias sniffed. He turned his hand over so he could hold Adam’s, and then looked quickly at Adam under his eyebrows as if to check that doing that was alright.

 

Adam smiled at him encouragingly.

 

“I like you, Adam,” Elias said, in the manner of one handing down a verdict. “Of course, as my brother Gabriel says, I haven’t known you very long. But I like you very much so far, more than anyone else ever. And you are very beautiful. I am allowed to say it that way, yes? Just not to say you’re like a girl? Even though it’s true?”

 

Adam chuckled. There was a devilish gleam in Elias’ eyes that suggested he knew exactly what Adam would think of what he was saying. “It’s not OK to talk like that, Elias,” he said anyway. And then, drawing Elias’ hand up to his lips, he kissed it. “But the rest of what you said…” He leant in, his hair falling forward and hiding his face, and let another few loose tears drop onto the back of Elias’ knuckles.

 

“I am such a fucking mess,” Adam murmured, and knew it wasn’t for the first time that day. Not surprising in some ways – it was something he often thought - but on the other hand, something he barely ever usually let himself say aloud or admit.

 

“Why are you upset?” Elias’ question came like a question – not an expression of frustration, of exasperation with him, but as a wish to understand.

 

“Because you’re being nice to me?” Adam laughed again, and gulped, and coughed.

 

Elias laughed too – he seemed relieved. “But you would like me to carry on being nice all the same, yes?”

 

Adam bit his lip, then nodded. “Yes. Yes I would like that very much. Do you think you…” he paused, trying to phrase the words in the right way. “Elias, I’m the first guy you’ve dated, the first guy you’ve slept with. There are a lot of other people out there. Do you think you really want to carry on… being nice, with someone as messed up as me?”

 

“Yes!” Elias looked amazed, wide eyed again. “You are confusing, but you are also very interesting.” He went a little pink, and looked away. “I like you,” he mumbled, as bashful as a schoolchild.

 

“I like you too,” Adam said, seriously.

 

Elias looked up at him like he was the most wonderful thing in the world.

 

-

 

Adam was shaking.

 

Lying back on the sofa, one hand gripping the back of it just to try and keep from collapsing, as, from above, feet braced on the floor, Elias touched him.

 

At this moment, Elias was rubbing at one of Adam’s nipples, hand pushed up under his t-shirt. Adam couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this way from something as small as that. He was shivering with it, hard in his trousers.

 

Elias was hard too. At one point quite early in what they’d been doing, Adam had thought Elias had come in his pants, but Elias kept going all the same, with just a sharp whimper to betray himself. And he was erect now, either way - the huge mound between his legs straining at the fabric.

 

They could have got naked at once, after getting down from the dinner table, biscuits eaten, coffee and tea drunk, but Adam had found himself wanting to be slow, careful, almost chaste about this. And Elias, with his shyness appearing again, hadn’t argued the point.

 

In any case, Elias seemed set on doing exactly what Adam wanted.

 

Now, Elias was still moving so very carefully. Clearly it was a struggle for him not to break out and start grabbing, and occasionally he had done so – quick, abortive movements that he visibly fought down, pulling back his hands and flexing his fingers until apparently he felt able to reach out slowly again, and recommence the more gentle stroking, just touching and exploring Adam’s mostly-clothed body as Adam had told him to, giving them more time to learn each other.

 

It had hurt Adam, once or twice, just a little – moments pushing or rubbing harder than off the top edge of pleasant, but Elias had stopped the second Adam had asked him to, and Adam had found himself thanking Elias for it, praising him gently, feasting on the way it made Elias’ face light up. It was abundantly clear that Elias blossomed under careful treatment, and it gave Adam a glowing feeling in his chest that was not entirely to do with how aroused he was becoming, although that was no small part of it, of how the glittering light fractured and enveloped him and every breath sparkled to his toes.

 

“Please, yes, good, that’s so good,” he murmured now, and felt Elias’ hands keep moving, rough fingers plucking at him. Apparently when allowed to touch however he liked, Elias wanted to get at every possible piece of skin, and he’d started with Adam’s fingers and arms, working his way to areas of more and more interest.

 

There was an unreadable expression on Elias’ face, as now he raised one hand to Adam’s mouth, and felt around his lips, running over the uninterrupted curve of the top one with his thumb.

 

Adam couldn’t resist sucking the tip in, swirling his tongue around the pad. It tasted salty. Elias hissed in a breath that ruffled the hairs on his moustache, and blinked, and his hips made a thrust into the air between them.

 

Elias just looked so incredibly overwhelmed. Adam wanted to reach out and draw him in so they could be close again as they had been earlier. He couldn’t figure out why he was afraid of it. Why he felt paralysed, wanting too much to dare try taking anything.

 

 _There is no such thing as romance_ , he’d written at the head of his series of articles on modern dating so recently rejected by every paper he’d tried to flog them to. _Romance is a con we buy and sell ourselves to inflate the prices of things without inherent value – scentless red roses, cheap chocolates and candles in the age of the light bulb. The sooner the modern person realises this, the sooner they can escalate to the tier of existence where satisfaction will be found. Because, that is, that have realised that one person, at one place in time, will never be that satisfaction’s source._

 

Shifting a little on the sofa, still nursing on Elias’ finger, Adam moved them subtly until Elias’ hand was cupping his cheek just as it had been earlier, when Adam had been on the brink of collapse.

 

 _Rescue_ , Adam thought and leant into Elias’ warm palm, sighing, letting himself know that he wanted this, wanted to be petted. He’d never have tolerated anyone starting to try to treat him that way off their own bat, but Elias was so cautiously not overstepping boundaries, so sweetly, voluntarily obedient, that Adam felt eager to welcome him through every wall.

 

And he’d been right in his writing, in a way. This _was_ like another tier of existence, in the end. Just not a place he’d ever known there could be, or would ever have dreamed he would get to.

 

He began to suck more strongly on Elias’ thumb, and Elias bit his lip and started sliding his thumb in and out of Adam’s mouth in small increments – larger, as Adam murmured appreciatively and didn’t pull away. Adam whined and arched his back, the movement against his palate sparking thrills down his body and between his legs, fanning the flames.

 

“Please,” Elias said at length, and his voice was broken glass over gravel. “Please may I put my finger into your behind again?”

 

Adam’s cock gave a painful twitch. That hadn’t been what he’d been expecting to be asked for. His chest tightened again. He released the thumb so he could nod. Bending in half, he hurried to undo his belt and get his jeans down, giving up on them when they were around his knees.

 

He didn’t miss the look that Elias gave his groin, to his Adam’s cock bobbing eager and pink in the air. That look was… uncertain. Weighing. Considering. Like a man judging an item on a menu and whether it will be too spicy, or a distance to jump and whether it will be too far.

 

Challenging that look, Adam lay once more on his back, his legs open, rather than turn over and make it easier for Elias to ignore what troubled him.

 

“Get the bottle of lube from my suitcase,” Adam told him. “The bigger case, top pocket, on the right. That’s the one.”

 

As Elias came back over to the sofa, Adam sat up, thinking.

 

“We need something to protect the fabric under me on the sofa here.” He allowed himself to look up at Elias from under his eyelashes, to enjoy the response to his words: “This could get messy.”

 

Obediently, Elias went again, and returned with a towel. Adam shifted so Elias could lay it down. The towel was an old one, rough against the skin of Adam’s back, most of the soft nap gone. The average person would have put it out for rags by now, but this, like the rug, had been carefully darned and saved.

 

Adam gave Elias’ upper arm an encouraging caress.

 

“Get your fingers ready then.”

 

Slowly, staring all the time as if he almost didn’t expect Adam to turn out to be a tangible reality, or to disappear suddenly unless kept track of, Elias did as he was told.

 

Then, trembling a little, Elias reached out to him.

 

Adam cocked his knee up to make it all as easy as possible, made all the sounds of encouragement and praise he could.

 

Elias got in fine, eyes darting between Adam’s hole and his face. Adam gasped, swore, and grabbed at Elias’ arm, riding the soreness of the stretch after the night before as a delicious counterpoint to how hot it felt to be touched there again now.

 

He was starting to find Elias’ contemplative frown impossibly sexy.

 

Elias’ thick fingers, sliding deep, soon had Adam moaning rhythmically, shifting and trying to get his knees further apart. He was hot in his belly, sweating behind his knees, surging with blood.

 

“You can now,” Adam said, panting. “You can now, get a condom and you can now, you can fuck me, I’m ready if you are, are you hard? Please be hard.”

 

Elias grunted, standing up – Adam moaned at the loss of the nice, thick fingers – and showed that hard he most definitely was.

 

Adam felt himself flex and tighten hungrily just at the sight.

 

But Elias’ face was wary, nervous.

 

“It’ll be OK,” Adam reassured him. “I’ll tell you what to do. We can do this. I’ll like it, I want it, please.”

 

“But you wanted my penis,” Elias said, like that wasn’t a total non-sequitur.

 

Adam blinked, feeling he’d missed something. “Yes, exactly. I did. I do. That’s what I mean.”

 

“I know that’s what you mean. I’m not stupid you know.” Elias frowned again, and not such a good frown, Adam feared. “But you don’t see what _I_ mean, so I will explain. You agreed to meet me in the first place because you wanted my penis inside you. If you achieve that goal, you might…” he shrugged. His bottom lip was sticking out, sulky, anxious. “I mean my penis will be the best you have ever had, but if the point of the exercise is novelty value…”

 

“It isn’t,” Adam said earnestly. “Maybe it was, before I’d met you, but now, I promise you…”

 

He didn’t know what to say. A man whose whole career was words, and the art of them, and he didn’t have anything now.

 

Surging up onto his knees, naked as he was, Adam leant forward, and put his hands to either side of Elias’ face, and kissed him.

 

It felt a little bit odd – that was mostly the moustache. Elias tasted of pizza, they both did. His lips were a bit dry and chapped. Adam thought he wouldn’t have noticed the cleft, particularly, if he hadn’t known it was there.

 

All the time he’d spent up till now not kissing Elias seemed incredibly foolish. The closeness of the act, usually tedious to him with other partners, now seemed insufficient. Adam opened his mouth a little, unable to stop a little gasp escaping, and pressed close again.

 

Adam kept on kissing gently, nibbling and sipping, until eventually Elias started to respond.

 

Elias mirrored him, carefully, and shook a little, and his skin got warmer. Adam twisted his fingers desperately in Elias’ hair.

 

After a while Adam pulled back to breathe, studying Elias’ face, trying to see if what he’d wanted to say had gone in.

 

Elias gaped at him for a moment, then broke into a breathless, gorgeous grin.

 

“That was extremely pleasant,” Elias adjudged. “Really highly commendable.”

 

Adam leant back down again slowly, holding eye contact, keeping his hands to Elias’ skin even as he pulled away. “I can’t promise I won’t freak out again, or doing something foolish, but I do want you, all of you. I want you inside me, but if you didn’t want to do that, I’d still want you.”

 

“I do want to do that,” Elias said quickly. He seemed calm again, happily eager. “I do, Adam. Can I?”

 

Adam grinned back, opening his arms in welcome. “We’re good to go. Just one condom away.”

 

The feeling when Elias’ (suitably covered) cock was finally sliding slowly, slowly into him made Adam clench his teeth and hiss. It was so nearly too much, so full, so thick inside him, driving every other thought and sensation away in hot, glorious ache of it.

 

But Elias, Elias was trembling in Adam’s arms, Elias was moving against him, chest hair brushing Adam’s nipples, Elias was panting, saying his name, Elias was sobbing, almost. Adam felt himself relax further, open up yet more – Elias’ cock went deeper still and Adam’s vision blurred.

 

All the same, he kept his hands clasped tight around Elias, held him close, drew him in.

 

“Yes, yes, yes,” Adam was saying. “Yes. Please. Yes, yes, yes.”

 

He was feeling so good, he almost wasn’t sure what was happening when he suddenly felt even better. When he looked, he had to blink, eyes wide.

 

But yes, there, there was Elias reaching between them even as he panted, and carefully moving to stroke at Adam’s cock, twisting slightly at the head.

 

Adam melted.

 

-


	7. Epilogue

“Ready again?” Adam chuckled. “Oh my dear man…”

 

Elias tightened his grip around Adam’s shoulders. He had a suspicion he might need something to hold onto in the next few minutes.

 

“Hmmm, I wonder how often we can manage tonight, eh?”

 

Elias considered that his precautions had not been unwise.

 

Adam, grinning, Adam looking beautiful and tousled and entirely too sweet for someone with such devilish ideas as he came up with, was reaching between them and stroking at Elias’ already-thickening penis, murmuring happily as it stirred into his hand.

 

“It is Tuesday,” Elias pointed out, with half a feeble gesture at the chart on the bedroom wall. “We never usually have so many orgasms between us on a Tuesday, which one might assume is because it is my late night at university class and your phone call with your mother.”

 

“Argh! Elias!” Adam winced. “Well we certainly won’t break any records if you bring her up when we’re actually in bed!”

 

Elias grinned, and shifted a little, moving to lie on his side so that Adam had better access to his body. Adam liked to be able to let his hands wander whenever the two of them they lay like this, after the first orgasms of the night had calmed them down and made everything slow, and Elias had no problem with that happening.

 

He liked Adam’s body very much too, after all. He had decided, upon consideration, that gender-related body shape considerations, such as they were – and all too often they were silly anyway - ought not to be important to sensible people, but then, of course, not everyone had the advantage of being able to be with Adam, and so they would never be as well off as Elias in their lover, whatever their orientation.

 

He liked, too, what Adam had done since moving into the flat with him, in the way of organising and even tidying a bit, even though it had meant having to do chores rather more often.

 

Adam had stayed for nearly two weeks, in that first time, and then had gone back to the UK for a while, which Elias hadn’t liked at all but which Adam (and Gabriel) had said was a good idea, just to check that they still wanted each other even after being apart.

 

Elias wanted Adam more, if anything, after having to do without him, so he had no idea what the point of that was. It occurred to him during the separation, however, that, from the converse perspective, Adam might decide he didn’t want to come back again.

 

It had been a very good day, after that, when finally he was waiting at the airport and then seeing Adam coming off the flight like he’d said he would. Adam had kissed him, right there in the arrivals lounge, and put his arms around him, and Elias had been so busy hugging back he’d forgotten to think about whether anyone was looking at them or not. Adam had been sad, without Elias – he’d said as much, and been too thin and pale besides, and looking like he hadn’t slept – and Elias had realised suddenly that he’d been worrying about that too, as well as about Adam not wanting him – that Adam would want him, need him, and he wouldn’t be there.

 

He would always be there for Adam from now on, though. So that would be OK.

 

Adam’s things from London had come over in various boxes, over the next few weeks. His things fit in fairly OK around Elias’, and he hadn’t asked Elias to get rid of anything, or at least not anything that wasn’t mouldy. One day there’d been a photographer from some London newspaper trying to take pictures of the flat windows from the street, and Adam had laughed and given him the finger.

 

“I don’t mind telling the world how I feel about you,” Adam had said calmly, after. “In fact I think I’d rather like to, sooner or later, maybe even officially.” And then he had smiled, soft and lovely, like he did more and more, and then he’d wanted Elias’ penis again, which was always very nice indeed.

 

Elias liked Adam’s penis, come to that. He liked it as it was now, all soft and pink against Adam’s belly, but he liked it hard too, hard because of him, and he’d discovered last week that it was even nice when it was hard and inside him. Adam said he’d rather do it the other way round usually, but having Adam inside had been, in some ways, like the best hug in the world, and Elias thought they ought to try again occasionally.

 

“That feels good,” Elias said now. Adam had told him to be verbal about what was working for him when they had sex, around the time they’d started on the project to put Adam’s penis in Elias. He hadn’t got out of the habit since. Adam liked being told he was good at things too, and why not, after all?

 

“Hmm, oh yeah? How about this?” Adam grinned again – his eyes were so bright – and curled his body down, red lips opening.

 

Elias arched his back, gasped. He put his hand carefully on the back of Adam’s neck, stroked him there until Adam surfaced, wiping his mouth, having worked Elias back up to total thudding arousal.

 

“Can I get on, please?” Adam asked. “Dearest man, can I?”

 

“You don’t ask me,” Elias chided.

 

Adam curled his lip and raised his eyebrow. “I suppose I don’t, do I? OK, so it’s that kind of night? Good. Maybe we’ll break the Tuesday record, at least, then.” He coughed, and cracked his neck, and then kneeled up to straddle Elias’ body, the whole length of his nice, warm body rearing up.

 

“Stay there,” Adam instructed from his position above. “Stay still. I want to sit on your cock. I want you inside me. I want you, Elias, right now.”

 

They didn’t do condoms any more. Elias had felt he ought to explain that to Gabriel, just to be clear that they’d made the decision carefully and with the right sort of tests. Gabriel had said that would be fine and that it didn’t count as breaking a promise.

 

So now, Adam didn’t have to stop and look in the drawers of the bedside cabinet, and could just get himself positioned over Elias’ penis and move down, opening up to it easily since Elias had already been in him today.

 

Elias could come a lot, doing this, and so could Adam – even if Adam had stopped shooting semen from his penis, things still happened inside that made him groan and grin and clutch at Elias like he was drowning. After getting like that he would be soft and sleepy and wanting to be held for a long time, and Elias liked that a lot.

 

But then, he liked this too, Adam staring at him intently and holding down his shoulders.

 

“Dearest man,” Adam said, eyes closed, as he got fully seated.

 

“My love,” Elias told him, carefully. It was OK to say that, Adam had said he liked it, Adam had said it was a good thing.

 

Adam certainly liked it now. He clenched down for a moment, and shivered, and curled in for a kiss and a cuddle as they moved together, joined.

 

-


End file.
